Denise Mina Quotes

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.

With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.

To my mind, the most successful and the best comic book illustrators are those who translate the real world into a consistent code. If you look at Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, their drawings look nothing like the real world, but they are internally consistent. In terms of a comic book it can work just fine.

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.

My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling.

In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.

Comics don't work if the story is all in the text and the images are illustrative. It's hard to have enough faith in the artists to allow them to do their job.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

With things like 'Dragon Ball,' in the case of fight scenes, I'd take the panel layout across two pages when the book is opened and alter it by angling them, and making them bigger or smaller, to give movement to the panels themselves.

I had a lot of ideas on how comics worked and pretty early on I had this idea that it would be fun to explain them in comics form.

When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.

I think the best collaborations in comics come from a lot of talks with the artists where you are finding out what they want to draw, what kind of villains they want to do.

I want a nice picture book with 12 pictures - I do my best with that format.

Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.

I love print fiction, but sometimes when I'm reading a good graphic novel or manga, I find myself envying those who work in an illustrated format.

Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it's better to do both.

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.

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

There has to be the right pacing of images to tell the story. I'm always stunned at how little you can put in.

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

In terms of graphic versus prose, I could probably do a lecture on that topic. But what stood out most was the difference in pacing the language and resulting scenes. One illustration can do so much for the reader.

Comics don't work without the visuals, obviously.

I didn't read many comics as a kid - I've always been a really fast reader, and I would fly through a comic book in a few minutes and be so mad that it ended so quickly. But now that I've been in the business, I tend to look at the panels so much more carefully, and realize that so much of it is about the art; I don't think I got that before.

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've read comics all my life and have wanted to write a comic for as long as I can remember. Alex Barnaby and Sam Hooker seemed like the perfect team to make the move into the graphic medium.