Scott McCloud Quotes

As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.

It's not an accident that, while bookstores are all in a tizzy, one of the more lively and alive sections is the so-called "graphic novel" section, because those are harder to replace.

Something you can do in a comic that you can't do in a film is that you can have thought bubbles.

Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.

I never feel there's anything I can't do with comics. There are certain things in comics that you can't do in any other medium: for instance, in Mister Wonderful, Marshall's narration overlaps the events as they're going on. That would be difficult in film; you could blot speech out with a voiceover, but it wouldn't have the same effect. That's always of interest, to see what new things you can do in comics form.

I read graphic novels, here and there, but I'm not a comic book guy, as much.

The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.

Obviously, I love superheroes; I love comic book characters, but I... I guess I've had a lifelong affection for comics, and while I love the characters so much, I also love the medium.

Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.

I certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.

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.

Frank is such a great visual storyteller, that if you study his artwork you see that his Sin City books are already the best movies never seen on the big screen.

I want to point out to adults that there is a world of good material available to you now in comic form - in this medium - and learn to give it your support because the more you support it, the better the material will be as it comes out.

I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.

One of the things about comics is people can linger on images and words as long as they want.

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 write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.

I hadn't thought specifically about doing graphic novels until a couple of my friends got contracts for them. Then I started picturing how various of my stories or poems would work in an illustrated format and thinking how cool that would be.

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

I'm never one to care too much if my work becomes adapted; I make comic books.

To be honest, writing comics is a dream come true - the form is unparalleled and is home to some of the most original and innovative storytelling around.

But with comics you're reading and assimilating an image simultaneously, instead of just reading or watching the tube.

I am a big fan of the web comic 'Strong Female Protagonist,' illustrated by Molly Ostertag.

I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures.

Comics, at least in periodical form, exist almost entirely free of any pretense; the critical world of art hardly touches them, and they're 100% personal.