Patrice Leconte Quotes

Comics don't work without the visuals, obviously.

That's the beauty of short films; their strength lies in delivering a message creatively and simply.

"Real" drawing is about specifics. It's about describing an object as accurately as possible. In a comic strip you have to draw a picture of the idea of the object. You have to draw the word that you are picturing, then you have to mix in specifics with it for it to work as a story. But you are still working with drawn words.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

To be an animator you have to be able to tell stories but I'm not very verbal - I definitely do it through pictures.

Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.

I love writing, but I stopped because I felt I was more effective approaching filmmaking from a different vantage point.

A comic is a way of literally experiencing someone else's vision with a purity that I don't think any other medium offers; there are no technical, electronic or financial limitations; one only has to work harder to improve. Lately I think a new attitude has prevailed that comics aren't inherently an Art form, but that some cartoonists are genuinely artists.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

You can write a little and can draw a little, but there's necessarily a limitation on both in a comic strip, since it appears in such a tiny space.

All the pictures I could never do, I'll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.

A sketch is just a mini movie.

There's a creative freedom to comics, and a fulfillment I get out of panel layouts and storytelling that is hard for me to get anywhere else.

In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.

Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.

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

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

I want to bring drawing back to the basics, make it about the pleasure that it can afford and remove the notion that it's some kind of precious or difficult activity. It's another way of telling a story.

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.

It takes more drawing to tell a story in pantomime.

I have sketched since a young age, so there's always been an artistic side, a visual side to my personality.

The graphic novel form really interests me and I like the freedom that format offers.

Storytelling is one of comics' esthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist's problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of "writing," the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience. As far as I'm concerned, that's really all I've been trying to do formally for the past decade or more with comics, and it's certainly time-consuming, since it has to be done with drawings, not words.

I just try to make comics for myself, try to give it some kind of unity throughout. That often involves tiny details. I'm never sure what's going to be obvious or what nobody will ever notice. I put stuff in my comics that I thought was blatantly obvious, and nobody noticed. And things that I think are buried in the background, everybody gets it. So I try to be consistently aware of every part of the frame.