Brian Stelfreeze Quotes

Learning to write comics is, in fact, so bloody difficult because it's such a weird form that it does actually make you a bit more adaptable for other forms.

Some of my earliest work was in comics. I tend to think in pictures and always like to write scenes possessing the dynamic you find in comics.

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.

I love graphic novels - I love reading them, I enjoyed writing them, I would love to go back and do them again. I hope I'm savvy enough to do them in the right way.

Seriously, you know - I love to write. I enjoy the process; I enjoy the different processes, because writing for film and television and graphic novels is all very different. So I've never had the feeling of, 'Oh, you have to do this one thing.'

Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.

Comics are a wonderful form. You can do so much with it.

Writing a graphic novel is hard. It feels closer to a screen play than to a novel.

For screenwriting, when you're writing, you're talking to hundreds - hundreds of people who might be interpreting what you're saying. When you're writing a comic book, you're really only talking to the artist.

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

In comics, there are depths that don't reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about 'Watching the Watchmen' - like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air - might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it.

I tend to like writing long stories in comics. I worked on 'Flash,' 'Teen Titans' and 'JSA' for years. I always like diving into characters.

I don't need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.

All through my comics career, I was always trying to reinvent the 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 mostly associated video game storytelling with unforgivable clumsiness, irredeemable incompetence - and suddenly, I was finding the aesthetic and formal concerns I'd always associated with fiction: storytelling, form, the medium, character. That kind of shocked me.

Write comic books if you love comic books so much that you want to write them. Don't write them like movies. Comics can do a lot of things that movies can't do, and vice versa.

In a weird way, I think I'm much better at oneshots than longform. So I try to focus on five or six-issue arcs. I have a real fondness for the one-shots because that's where I do my best storytelling.

So much of comics are dictated by characters talking to one another - or in focused spaces where 'the camera' has to stay in pretty close on what's going on.

I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.

I was trained in storytelling by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, and Larry Hama. Doesn't make me a genius, and there really isn't anything fancy about the stage direction in my scripts.

People have told me that the dialogue in '100 Bullets' is very realistic. I don't agree.

'Scalped' No. 1 was only the third comic script I'd ever written. I really learned a lot about writing on the fly with that series.