Cliff Chiang Quotes

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

Comics don't work without the visuals, obviously.

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.

I draw on a lot of cinematic influences like Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders, artists who let a story take its time. Comics are a visual medium, and visuals should be allowed to tell some of that story.

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

I love the interplay between words and pictures. I love the fact that in comics, your pictures are acting like words, presenting themselves to be read.

But with comics you're reading and assimilating an image simultaneously, instead of just reading or watching the tube.

Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.

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

I'm a big illustration and comic book fan. In my eyes, comic books and illustration are the same kind of art forms.

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

With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.

I think you can do anything with comics that you could do in just about any art form.

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

I had a lot of ideas on how comics worked and pretty early on I had this idea that it would be fun to explain them in comics form.

Comics as art. I do comics as comics, and my opportunity to tell stories. Simple. Basic. Let the characters have the excitement, not the package. That's where I come from.

Comics are not theatre - there's a very important difference in that the reader controls the page. You can linger on a page of comics as long as you want. You can read and go forward and then move back; you can reread, in one sitting or at your leisure. You can take as much time as you want to take in that story.

I love print fiction, but sometimes when I'm reading a good graphic novel or manga, I find myself envying those who work in an illustrated format.

Comics don't work if the story is all in the text and the images are illustrative. It's hard to have enough faith in the artists to allow them to do their job.

I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.

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

Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.

I've said this before, but I don't like putting captions in my comic books. I feel, for me, they become a crutch, a way to ignore the essential fact that our medium is a visual medium, and the greatest pleasures to be derived from comics are how stories can be told with pictures.