Harvey Pekar Quotes

I love writing novels, but there is something deeply invigorating about the comic-book medium.

I feel like there are comic book artists who are comic book artists, and then there's comic book artists who are cartoonists.

We grew out of the superhero comics, but we still liked comics, so we started putting our own experiences in the stories we were doing for our own amusement.

I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.

Comics are so full of amazing work. And I can't look at a drawing of a woman without thinking of, for instance, Wallace Wood and his amazing way of capturing beauty.

I'm supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing.

When I was a young artist, I liked and was interested in belonging to the mainstream comics group. I didn't introduce myself as an author, but only as a designer.

I'd begun reading Crumb shortly before that, and other underground stuff, so that was an influence to some degree. Of course the Marvel and DC comics, they had been my main interests in my teenage years.

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

Frank Miller and David Mack are incredible artists.

My father spent his entire early career as an illustrator for comic books: EC Comics like 'Tales from the Crypt' and 'Creepshow,' then moving on to such magazines as 'Mad' and 'Weird Science.'

The reason I love comics and have collected them for 37 years is because I always wanted to be an illustrator and a writer - and comics are really the perfect blend of those two mediums.

I knew I really wanted to work in comics in 1979.

When I started in the comic book business, 'Art Of' books were strictly the provenance of the greats, like Rembrandt and Da Vinci. But times change, and so do attitudes. Now the comic is considered an art form, and I hope 'A Life in Words and Pictures' contributes a little to that art form's history.

I think, for the most part, comics have devolved into fantasy for the sake of fantasy.

There are so many versions of Batman that I love so much from different artists that I had to almost stop trying to draw those versions and get past that and just draw the Jeff Lemire version of Batman eventually.

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.

And I've never viewed comics as assignments for the client.

Jerry often says that Slam Bradley was really the forerunner of Superman, because we turned it out with no restrictions, complete freedom to do what we wanted; the only problem was that we had a deadline.

When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.

When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.

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.

I've always felt that the comic strip medium stands equally beside all the other story telling mediums: novels, movies, stage plays, opera, you know, you name it.

I was able to accomplish pretty much everything I set out to do with my run on Superman, and I'm really proud of how it turned out. I hope that readers enjoyed it, too!

From 'The Sandman' and 'Black Orchid' to 'Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?,' Neil Gaiman has provided some of the most memorable stories of the comic book industry.