Neal Adams Quotes

It was a challenge to be able to create a character without being able to use one's normal set of expressions. All the rubber and makeup attached to your face left you with only a modest range of facial movements.

One thing I think is that comics are really good at expressing emotion. I think there's a way that comics characters can be drawn not-realistically, but the emotional reality is still very sincere. So you can have these exaggerations that express inner emotion through physical appearance.

Comics as art. I do comics as comics, and my opportunity to tell stories. Simple. Basic. Let the characters have the excitement, not the package. That's where I come from.

I really like the look of old '70s and '80s Japanese comics, so I think that style is something I will continue to draw.

Comic art is just different. It's art on its own terms.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.

Beetle Bailey is actually me, in uniform. I've got about 20 characters, and they're all after friends of mine.

For characters where, in a comic, I'd avoid using screen tone because it's such a bother, I'd deliberately use it in animation in order to highlight their individual characteristics.

When I set out to make 'Bourne Identity,' my main goal for the franchise was to create something where it feels like you're in the action. You're not just passively watching it from far away. That's something that I have constantly aspired to do - even in 'Swingers,' to feel like you're Jon Favreau; you're not just watching him.

For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.

Working on 'Nightmare Before Christmas,' I had endless arguments, like the studio saying, 'You can't have a main character that's got no eyeballs!' 'How is anybody going to feel for somebody with just eyesockets?' You know? So, it's those kind of things that really wear you down.

It's the same assignment on every part: you want to create a real world, and the tone of it is a little different on each movie. You have to find your tone and work within that to make it as real so the audience can really engage in the story you're telling.

I'm a one-uniform kind of person; I like to establish the look of a character and just stick with that - like a cartoon.

I like pointing the camera at the actors and letting them fight. Don't let the camera do the fighting for you, and don't let the camera give them the adrenaline hit. Let the people in the frame do that.

As a cinematographer or director, I'm always looking for projects that are able to say a lot with the actor's expressions.

The great thing about working in comics is that visually, you're the sole voice. You have to figure out the staging, the lighting, the composition, the character emotions, the action. You get a script, but you're trying to work it out in individual panels. It's a terrific exercise in creative thinking and creative problem-solving.

Reilly Brown is a master of balancing action, humor, and extreme violence, and his character designs for some of the alien races and technology that we encounter is just amazing.

I started out as a producer. and I used to work at Disney. and I worked with a lot of the animators and went on to become great friends with a lot of these guys and worked on a lot of projects together.

I gravitate much more toward realism, realism in the work that I do, but magical realism got me hooked on film. I think it was my first time realizing that there was something besides popcorn movies.

Theatre is more metaphorical where you have to be louder and larger than life, whereas film is more subtle and more real.

On the 'Tom and Jerry's,' Joe and I would sit across a desk from each other and develop the story. Joe would do the storyboard and I'd do the timing and the direction of the animation.

There are a lot of really great cartoonists out there. It's nice to be thought of as one of them.

I always loved that solitary experience of making things. There's a solitary aspect to animating... It's ultimately the animator and the puppet coaxing a performance out of it.

I find that using real people as models keeps me from getting too formulaic in the designs of characters.