Art Spiegelman Quotes

I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren't just kid stuff.

Comics are so full of amazing work. And I can't look at a drawing of a woman without thinking of, for instance, Wallace Wood and his amazing way of capturing beauty.

Jerry often says that Slam Bradley was really the forerunner of Superman, because we turned it out with no restrictions, complete freedom to do what we wanted; the only problem was that we had a deadline.

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.

People underestimate the complexity of comic books.

I'm a severe graphic novels junkie. People ask me about it, and I say I like the graphic novels. Comic books are for kids, and graphic novels are for adults. But you can't really separate the two.

We grew out of the superhero comics, but we still liked comics, so we started putting our own experiences in the stories we were doing for our own amusement.

My first influences were superhero artists.

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.

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'm very much influenced by your traditional comic book artists like Jack Kirby, Alex Toth and Walter Simonson. Their styles were sort of what I was gravitating towards.

Marvel Comics has always been a place where I felt at home. It has been a very important part of my life and has always been a wellspring of creative and relevant ideas.

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.

I think comics have far more potential than a lot of people realize.

Comics are my first love, and I hate seeing an art form that I love suffer.

I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.

I'd quite like to write a book about comics, actually. But trying to write about comics as literature, which I don't think anyone's really done before. Sometimes they're more like fan books, and I'd quite like to write one about the Marvel universe over the last 50 years. It's an unprecedented achievement to create that length of continuity.

I'm not ashamed of comic books. You have some people that are like, 'We're trying to elevate comic books.' Comic books have always told great dramatic stories.

I love writing novels, but there is something deeply invigorating about the comic-book medium.

When I started in the comic book business, 'Art Of' books were strictly the provenance of the greats, like Rembrandt and Da Vinci. But times change, and so do attitudes. Now the comic is considered an art form, and I hope 'A Life in Words and Pictures' contributes a little to that art form's history.

One of the reasons that DC, Marvel, and other comic book companies have always asked me to do covers and variant covers is because they know that when they tell me 'icon,' I jump over their words, and I give them an iconic cover - but while I'm doing it, there is going to be an idea there.

Comics writing is for your artist. It's not for the general reader; it's for the artist. So I love writing scripts for artists.

The comics I made from 1990 to 1997 were largely based in vaguely urban, vaguely dystopic settings because that was my reference point for comics storytelling in general.

I just really respond to comics. I find it a really exciting medium.

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films.