Alan Moore Quotes

The graphic novel is a great form that can be used to marry the book format with the movie.

One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality.

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.

The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same.

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 think with something like 'Watchmen' you can genuinely call that a graphic novel because it has the weight and the intent of a proper novel and it also is the complete story.

Comics have always been storyboards.

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.

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

I always loved comic books and I'm still a great fan of the graphic novel.

In the right hands, a comic strip attains a beauty and elegance that, really, I would put against any other art.

Some people will say, "Why read a comic book? It stifles the imagination. If you read a novel you imagine what people are like. If you read a comic, it's showing you." The only answer I can give is, "You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?

I mistrust the term graphic novel because it sounds like a good thing to put on a tee-shirt. That's why the French like them.

The ancestors of printed comics drew, painted and carved their time-paths from beginning to end, without interruption, ... the infinite canvas.

There is something about the medium [in comics] that allows for a simulation of actual experience with the added benefit of actually reading. You're reading pictures, but you are also looking at them. It's a sort of combined activity that I can't really think of any other medium having, other than, say, a foreign film when you are reading and seeing. It allows for all sorts of associations that might not come up with just words or just pictures.

I think the best thing I learned from drawing comics is that it's a great exercise in concision.

People don't like to say comic so they say Graphic Novel, despite the fact that I don't think the true Graphic Novel has been written anywhere.

In the '40s and '50s, a lot of teachers and librarians saw the graphic novel as the enemy of reading.

When you hold a graphic novel in your hands, you're holding artist blood made ink.

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.

The project that I did between 'Boxer & Saints' was 'The Shadow Hero,' which is illustrated by Sonny Liew, an artist who lives in Singapore.

Every day I run into people who don't know what I do. And even after I explain it they still don't know what I do. So now I can just say, 'Pick up the Locas book!' And that tells them all.

With Groo, I try to do one story every book. Sometimes the stories are better if they go a little longer, and I choose to do it in four issues.

A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.

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.