Todd McFarlane Quotes

I became a writer through drawing first and then a comic book obsession - Marvel Comics, in particular. I invented a world of superheroes starting in third grade with my classmate, Wai-Kwan Wong. In a classroom of forty kids, let's just say there was a lot of undirected time. But this was good because I was a dreamy boy.

Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

I was hired to do as many Boy Commando, Newsboy Legion, and Sandman stories as I could.

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.

I tend to like writing long stories in comics. I worked on 'Flash,' 'Teen Titans' and 'JSA' for years. I always like diving into characters.

One of my favorite graphic novels of all time is Grant Morrison's 'Earth-2.'

I don't need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.

Comics is a great medium to get a lot of stories out.

My brother is a comic-book writer, and I was always in love with comics.

It wasn't until I discovered comics that I actually began to approach drawing as a possible career.

When I read 'Watchmen,' it changed my view of so many things. It was the first time I'd read a graphic novel really like that.

Spider-Man initially made me want to come to New York and work for Marvel; I wanted to be a comic book artist.

The decision to work with Marvel for a while isn't any sort of denigration of DC. I had a fantastic time there, I was treated extremely well, I have strong positive feelings about all of my editors and the DC universe of characters, and I look forward to hopefully working with them at some point down the road.

I ended up reading comics and just started drawing at a very young age. By high school, I was putting together longer stories. In college, I started doing strips for the newspaper and doing mini-comics. It sort of grew in scope and scale over time.

We relate comics to the main super-heroes, but it's a great medium through which all sorts of stories are told.

There are great comic books, these great geniuses that manage to tell you a story in one frame, and that became the thing that opened my eyes.

I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.

Comics are a dying art. If you ask a little kid to choose between a video game with insane graphics or comic books... you have to compete with cable, satellite TV with its thousands of channels, and with video games that are like movies, with CGI explosions where you can blow up worlds.

I'm excited for Christy Marx taking over 'Birds of Prey'. I adore 'Rachel Rising' by the great Terry Moore. I'm also a stone cold Scott Snyder fan; the guy is a joy to read and a pleasure to work with.

Aside for the dream of writing the core X-Men team, I think I would love to write an Excalibur book.

You have to think about space differently; you have to think about time differently when you're talking about a graphic novel versus a movie.

I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.

I'm not ashamed of comic books. You have some people that are like, 'We're trying to elevate comic books.' Comic books have always told great dramatic stories.

People underestimate the complexity of comic books.