I listen to a lot of standup comics.
I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.
Social media allows comics to bypass the gatekeepers and connect directly with people who will want to come see them.
What made me want to go into doing comics was I was working as a laborer with my father, a gardener.
I looked at comics like a buffet table, where you take a little bit of something and leave the other stuff behind.
I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I’ll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.
Even the strictest religious person from the strictest religious sect allows a little levity. Today, they congratulate you for carrying the Christian message into the comics.
The thing that I’ve learned, not just from writing comics but also from writing television programs like ‘Law & Order,’ is that you can fool some of the people some of the time – but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
I really like the look of old ’70s and ’80s Japanese comics, so I think that style is something I will continue to draw.
You can sometimes break rules in comics that you can’t necessarily break in cinema. It’s fun to find something cool in a comic and then try and find a way to break the same rule in another medium.
I started in comics in 2005, ten years ago, and at that time, I didn’t have a cell phone. I don’t even think I had a computer myself, you know. And just in those ten years, how much technology has changed.
I’ve got a particular way of writing novels, and that carries over into the way I write comics and games, too. I’m a news journalist by background, so I approach everything as reporting – I treat it as real, I ask the questions I’d ask in a real situation, and I let the characters speak for themselves.
‘Ghost Rider’ definitely has an appeal that’s far beyond comics.
At the Sahara, the seats are banked and most of the audience is looking down at the stage. Everybody in the business knows: Up for singers, down for comics. The people want to idealize a singer. They want to feel superior to a comic. You’re trying to make them laugh. They can’t laugh at someone they’re looking up to.
Honestly, I wasn’t familiar with the whole DC comics world and the Batman world before I was part of ‘Gotham.’
There’s a widespread cultural barrenness across art and political culture. But there are some pockets of resistance on the extreme margins, like the techno-savvy protest movements, small press, the creator-owned comics, that seem to be getting some signs of hope for the future.
I love getting on You Tube to look at the old comics. I am in my element seeing guys like Jack Benny and Phil Silvers give interviews.
I think comics in New York are interested in being comics. And there’re comics in L.A. who are touring comics, who are certainly more interested in stand-up, but a lot of L.A. stand-ups are really looking to do something else.
It was an unwritten law that black comics were not permitted to work white nightclubs. You could sing and you could dance, but you couldn’t stand flat-footed and talk; that was a no-no.
I love writing comics too much.
The development of the comedy club industry destroyed the uniqueness and intimacy of the profession but it also created jobs for comics and bred some great performers.
Unlike a lot of comics, I didn’t care about getting on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ That show had such history and was so established that I didn’t see the point.
My parents tolerated me reading comics because they knew I was also reading ‘proper’ books, too.
I love the challenge of taking established, iconic comics characters and showing readers why they remain contemporary.
Good comics gravitate to each other; you know who’s your type of person by watching them onstage, hopefully.
And I’ve never viewed comics as assignments for the client.
There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They’re like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages.
Comics creators are generally screwed in life: Most of us who are fortunate enough to do comics full time – which is very few of us – will literally draw until we die because we have no employment structures intact for retirement, much less insurance!
Well, don’t tell Steve Niles but I just don’t think horror works in comics.
I have grown up reading Marvel Comics and Marvel movies with their intricately woven storylines. It is fascinating to see how Marvel has created characters and stories that resonate so well with audiences across the globe, making movies at a scale that one had never before imagined.
I don’t like ‘graphic novel.’ It’s a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating – it’s just a media type.
Typically, in New York, there are so many comics on a single lineup that you can only do eight minutes.
And that, to me, is the main attraction to comics. It’s an avenue to say what you want to say.
I’ve always liked writing. Even when I was in art school and thought I was going to be a gallery painter, I liked to pair my artwork with writing. And so that naturally led to drawing comics.
I remember hearing the name… ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – what the hell is that?’ But I was hit by the bug as well. I used to watch the cartoon every morning before I went to school, played the video game at the arcades, and was a big fan of the comics.
I am a Tintin girl and grew up on Archie comics. Then I was introduced to Mr. Bean.
I am a huge, raving fan of writer Matt Fraction. His semi-indie ‘Casanova’ series is an ongoing masterpiece of 21st-century American comics – and his run on ‘Immortal Iron Fist’ with Ed Brubaker was pure, yummy martial-arts-fantasy deliciousness.
If you do approach a comics publisher, make sure it’s one that publishes the kind of book you want to make. Don’t take your literary fiction to Marvel or DC; don’t pitch your Spider-Man epic to Image.
Historically, diversity has been a real issue for superhero comics – so we need to do something about it, crafting strong, modern heroes for a modern audience.
Because I was in the business of translating the ‘X-Men’ from the very successful comics, and taking the most popular book of the 20th century in ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ and making it into three movies, I hope people realize I wouldn’t get involved in anything I didn’t think was really going to be worth their while.
Man, I don’t read books! I just read a bunch of ‘Walking Dead’ comics. I don’t even read comics, but zombies are something I just can’t get enough of.
I was a Marvel guy. I started reading comics when I was a kid.
Whether I’m doing music or I’m walking down the street or I’m in a record store buying a record or I walk into a comic store and I’m buying comics or having a drink with my friends, it’s the same me.
‘Comic book’ has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people’s minds. So someone will call ‘Die Hard’ a ‘comic-book movie,’ when it has nothing to do with comic books. I’d rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told.
While many comics have a secret persona, I fundamentally want to be myself.
I never was really into comics as a child, and I think if you miss the boat when you’re a kid, you don’t necessarily pick up on it when you’re an adult.
I had always been fascinated by comics, but it had taken me several weeks to make up my mind to buy ‘Watchmen’; for someone on a publisher’s assistant’s salary, it was some quite unheard-of sum of money.
I’ve always liked and appreciated storytellers like Garry Shandling and Bill Cosby – more long-form comedy. So starting in San Francisco, watching all these great comics – Patton Oswalt, Dave Chappelle – you get to see them a bunch, and you go, ‘Wow, this is where I need to be.’
I was not a giant comic book fan as a kid, but to the extent that I did read comics, Spider-Man was always my favorite guy.
I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart’s Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew.
I don’t want to be one of those comics who says, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with air travel?’ and stuff like that.
Few if any teenagers can relate to getting up for school and finding famous comics like Pryor and Williams hanging out in your living room after a hard night of partying. But that’s Hollywood.
I’m a big fan of ‘Akira,’ and I think comics are a great place to tell intelligent, fantastical stories. You can say stuff that you wouldn’t be able to in other mediums.
The comics were not only stories to enjoy; for me they were drawings that possessed me.
I think there’s a lot of wonderful comics that leave you hanging in a state of apprehension or anxiety before alleviating that tension with a joke.
I think comics should test people, I think it’s our job to go too far. That way we know as a society what too far is. Where else are you going to hear it?
I loved comics for a long time, loved the medium, and I love where comics are going. It’s on the forefront of social issues, and there’s no production value limit, so you can create an entire world. As long as you can visualize it, you can make it a reality.
