Len Wein Quotes

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.

No matter how much people want to pretend that they're embarrassed by it, that they don't watch it, everybody knows about it. It's truly, I believe, one of the only art forms that America has actually given to the world, besides jazz and comic books.

Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking. . . . the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things - all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.

If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the Western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are - at their best - an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.

I love music, I love all kinds of music, particularly jazz. Jazz is an extension of America. There's no other country in the world that could have produced jazz.

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.

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.

Graphic novels are such a visually creative world - it's really interesting what they can do in one sketch. Now I'm hooked.

Jazz told people about the special music that came out of America and about America in general and this kind of liberty and freedom that we have.

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.

We don't have a superhero culture. Comic books and superheroes are part of American culture. We have 'Amar Chitrakatha,' etc.

I'm always interested in using comics in different ways.

Graphic novels and comic books offer an easy foothold into that world, and screenwriters and studio execs gravitate toward those, because I think they can see it all right there. It's like, "Here's what the movie looks like."

I'm really interested with the way light plays on images and one of the artists that really reawakened my interest in comic books was Frank Miller and his treatment of Daredevil, and then Wolverine and, of course, Batman.

I think comedy and music are both things that we need as human beings. I think that both art forms can touch people.

The comic book, and I've said it before, is a treasure trove. It's a grab bag. We certainly have characters and story lines that we really want to do - but to get there in a TV series, you have to take your time. Sometimes you can't get right to it. They're two different mediums. So we make it our own and really own the material. I like to think of it as an alternate universe.

There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.

I think my favorite medium is music, with my main tools being my voice and a guitar. But I do find every other medium extremely fulfilling and useful in helping everything I do. Sometimes I need to make a song just for a comic. All of the art and mediums are connected for me.

The extraordinary thing about comic books and graphic novels is that they cannot exist without the art. If my words disappeared tomorrow, well, whatever. This is a visual medium in which the eye and the mind work together to bear witness to story, to lives.

I think any comic book - or really, any book that you can read - in a sense is an educational tool in that it helps literacy. The more you read, the better you get at it. It almost doesn't matter what you read, the important thing is for young people to become readers.

I love jazz because it's so American; you know it's our Only Original Art Form. It just goes against the greed of corporate America and the Wall Street Banks that are destroying our economy.

I really have fun doing music for visuals and stuff.