Steve Breen Quotes

I'm partial to a Muji recycled-paper sketch book and a Sharpie ultrafine marker.

I write everything with fountain pens. I don't know why. I've done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I've never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points.

I still draw a lot though. Ballpoint pen is my preferred medium.

I've done illustration on the side. But other than that, comics have been my main things.

I use the old Strathmore vellum surface paper, which is the best paper you can get in the Western world for ink line drawing. It has a good, hard surface.

In the Golden Age of Batman, I penciled, inked, and lettered my strip by myself.

I've always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil - especially for corrections.

When you're looking for a sketchbook, you've got to find the right paper for the pens you like to use. I like to draw on both sides of the page.

I like to write and draw everything with sharpies. I even got one with my own name on it!

I used to draw and do a lot of calligraphy and typography. I'm a big sketcher, too.

I use a G-Pen from Zebra. Different people have different preferred pen nibs. I don't put much force on it when I draw, so I'll generally use a single nib for about three chapters.

I got to take classes in writing with a fountain pen, and actually, something you make is your own textbook. So, while you're learning about something, you have to write essays on it, and then you handwrite in cursive, in fountain pen, your essays out on beautiful paper and you bind it together into a book that you hand in at the end of the course.

An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.

I use Pilot's document ink, but their drawing ink is OK, too. It's just that I don't like the impression that clings to the pen tip.

I was going to be a storybook illustrator or an editorial illustrator. I ended up in a comics class by mistake because all the others were full, so I was like 'I'll stay for one class, and then I'll go take something else, because I don't care about comics.' I got pulled in really fast; I discovered I had a voice in comics that I didn't know I had.

There's no need to sharpen my pencils anymore. They're sharp enough. Even the dull ones will make a mark.

Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.

Even the most deft pen is a clumsy tool.

In the world of comics, Jack Kirby and Will Eisner may have been more influential artists, but Joe Kubert was its most influential man. Even if he were to be remembered solely for his body of illustration work, he’d still be one of the greats, but by opening the Kubert School in 1976, he was able to personally mentor and educate literally thousands of successful artists who owe their careers to his teachings.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

Canvas. J.C. Penney. $3.98. You like?

Write it down in your own handwriting.

It's not movies and it's not "fine art." The beauty of a comic is that it's clear, direct communication. My work is getting simpler and more cartoony because I'm much more interested in communication now than in any illustrative value.

I separate cartooning, which is fun and wacky and soulful, from illustration, which is very well-drawn and extremely uptight to look at. There's a difference. I'm a cartoonist.

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.