When I grew up, one of comedy idols was Rowan Atkinson, who of course is Mr. Bean and uses physical comedy. Same with Jim Carrey. Both of those guys. And Peter Sellers. Most of my comedy idols are physical comics.
I didn’t know the Green Lantern comics at all. I was a Superman reader.
There’s tons of people doing awesome things with comics online – I’m just one dude!
‘Just looking at pictures’ used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading.
Everybody that loves Nancy loves it in a slightly condescending way. Nancy is comics reduced to their most elemental level.
Girls have always read comics. There’s nothing intrinsically masculine about telling stories with pictures.
I’m a huge Marvel Comics fan, and I’m a huge ‘Wolverine’ fan, I like the ‘X-Men’ comic book.
There is a sequence in my ‘Detective Comics’ run where you can’t find consecutive issues by the same artist. That’s intentional. That was done on purpose.
I don’t think schooling of any sort really prepares you for real life. I don’t know if art school would have prepared me to draw comics. Half of the people I know in comics went to art school, half of them didn’t. Some of them went and dropped out.
Female comics cannot dress provocatively on stage.
The audience for comics has shifted dramatically. And the boundaries between books and fine arts have blurred. Maybe it’s the globalization of fine art through the Internet – it’s easy for certain groups to coalesce around a certain kind of work or medium.
One of the wonderful things that I’ve always loved as an art student, what I always loved about comics, was that they are interpreted differently by different graphic artists all the time, so now film is doing that thanks to Marvel Studios.
Some people can do things and get away with it. Comics are famously like that. Why is it that some guys can say the most horrible things and it’s not offensive, it’s funny?
Repeats are the absolute soul-crushing killers of the comics page.
The type of cartooning that I think is generally referred to as ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ is usually – the distinction is usually in terms of whether it’s made by one person, the entire thing is done by one hand or more of a production line process, which is how the comics that we grew up reading were made.
‘The Flash’ comics are visually amazing and so well done. I wish I had been introduced to them when I was growing up.
I’m a comic nerd. I’m a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.
The cool thing about ‘Sweet Tooth’ is that you can bring influences from the underground and alternative people that I read and also bring in some genre influences, too, from movies and comics. And kind of mash it all up. It’s a fun project.
I read everything from comics to magazines to fiction – I learned to read in English, years before being able to speak a word of it, by reading ‘National Geographic.’
I grew up on the old EC comic books before the Comics Code in North American and with all sort of good-natured fun. I never had nightmares I think because all of the old horror stuff that I was exposed to was well meaning in a certain sense.
In comics, there are depths that don’t reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about ‘Watching the Watchmen’ – like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air – might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it.
When I read comics, they were dense stories. When you put them down, there was a sense of having gotten a great deal from them.
I think that comics can do things movies can’t and vice versa. In my opinion, you only expose their weaknesses if you try too hard at making one exactly like the other.
One of the best decisions we made on the ‘Arrow’ pilot was to have the Deathstroke mask. Within 30 seconds, you knew you were watching a DC comics show.
Our job with Thanos is to make him the preeminent villain in the Marvel Universe. That is his role in the comics. That’s his role in these movies.
The topic of Sarah Palin has been open season to the media, entertainment industry, and club comics alike.
Really, it hasn’t changed for female comics; it’s still hard for females to really enter the game.
I learned about the psychology behind Elektra and that excited me. And then I read the ‘Daredevil’ comics, especially when they met because I wanted to get an understanding of the relationship between Elektra and Matthew.
Most of my work – including everything from my own comics to the covers I’ve drawn for ‘The New Yorker’ – is the result of taking some personal experience or observation and then fictionalizing it to a degree.
Some people admire the aspirational rock star figures whose biopics make it to TV, the people they watched as kids and made them want to play football for England. For some comics, it is often the Doug Stanhopes and the Joan Rivers.
The problem with most digital comics is that you’re simply taking print material and adapting it. It’s like reading through a cardboard tube.
I think comics have far more potential than a lot of people realize.
Comics and animation have some of the deepest stories I’ve ever seen.
I think Will Ferrell is probably completely evil, the darkest of them all. He is known among comics as the dark knight. An evil, evil man and a dangerous soul.
I love romance comics. I grew up with ‘Archie’ and got into other classic series as I got older, and I’ve been diving into ‘Patsy Walker’ since starting work on this project.
I like to think of my work and the way people approach it in the same way people approach a Lichtenstein painting. You can write a one-hundred-page dissertation about why he used comics. Or it could be like, ‘This is cute!’
There is a certain danger in thinking about diversity in its own little box, as something that is somehow separate from ‘normal’ comic books and comics creators.
I vividly remember my first ‘Superman’ comic, which my granddad bought me when I was about 7. From that point on, all I wanted to do is draw comics. And specifically, superhero and science fiction comics. Basically I used to copy comic books, and draw my own comics on scrap paper.
People think comedians don’t do drama. Comics are drama. And what is drama, as opposed to comedy? It’s all the same to me.
What we do as comics can be a service to people. It can make them laugh and take their mind off their problems for a few minutes.
Dwayne McDuffie was one of my favorite writers. When I was growing up, he was one of the few African Americans working in American comics.
I’ve always hated superheroes. I cannot stand them. I love Norse mythology, but I hate superheroes. They ruined movies, then comics, and now games.
I never do things fearing I could do right or wrong. I just do it because I just follow my guts. This is really how I did it for ‘Elektra’ because I was just amazed by all the comics. I was good for me to get inspired by them, and I just follow my guts for the rest.
Some comics are made to be displayed digitally, and it doesn’t degrade them.
There were very few women comics when I started out doing stand-up. But I always saw that as a great advantage.
I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.
My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert.
I started off doing indie comics that I wrote and drew myself. I was doing those for ten years before I started to work for DC. The first book that I wrote for DC was for another artist. I did some backups in ‘Adventure Comics’ years ago starring The Atom. That’s the first time that I ever wrote for another artist.
A lot of people will refer to comics by number to me, and I’ll realize they’re expecting me to remember all the comics by number. And I can’t even remember what I ate this morning, let alone which comic was #473!
Comics are really my life blood in a lot of respects.
I think the best collaborations in comics come from a lot of talks with the artists where you are finding out what they want to draw, what kind of villains they want to do.
There aren’t a lot of African-American superheroes. I’ve been reading comics since I was eight or nine years old. Luke Cage stood out.
Many comics stay in one city and develop their acts for that particular audience.
The U.S. museums weren’t looking at my paintings at all – they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.
My mother taught me to read in part by reading me Walt Disney comics, and I never stopped.
I’m a huge Marvel fan, and the fact that they take the liberties that they do in filmmaking – I think, if anything, that it dignifies the comics, and it says, ‘Yeah. This is a strong enough, robust enough source. We can bend it; it’s elastic. It’s bouncy.’
The real power of comics is writing as you draw.
