Jim Woodring Quotes

You know, I read graphic novels but not encyclopedically.

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.

There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They're like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages.

The 'Barnaby' books were always intended to be graphic novels.

In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.

As a small kid, I came across things like these early Edward Gorey books in department-store bookstores. These were these really unusual objects to me. I didn't know how they fit into the comic world or into newspaper comics.

I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.

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.

Obviously, I love superheroes; I love comic book characters, but I... I guess I've had a lifelong affection for comics, and while I love the characters so much, I also love the medium.

I was sort of on a mission with 'American Splendor.' I wanted to try to prove that comics could do things. I wanted to expand them beyond superheroes and talking animals. And I knew that was going to take a long time. But I just started writing an autobiography about my quotidian life.

Things improved a little bit in the '80s; there was kind of a revival of alternative comics, but then they went downhill in the '90s.

I came up with American Splendor. Some people think it's American Squalor.

When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.

I started off doing indie comics that I wrote and drew myself. I was doing those for ten years before I started to work for DC. The first book that I wrote for DC was for another artist. I did some backups in 'Adventure Comics' years ago starring The Atom. That's the first time that I ever wrote for another artist.

A cartoonist creates his whole universe without any input.

Just about everything put out by Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics is what I keep up with. And once in a while, I'll read the more mainstream comics - I like Grant Morrison's writing and some of Warren Ellis' stuff, although maybe they're more on the fringe of the mainstream.

Comics have always been storyboards.

We relate comics to the main super-heroes, but it's a great medium through which all sorts of stories are told.

I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.

I read comics because of the art.

I knew I wanted to do comics, but I wasn't sure what they were about or what I wanted them to be about.

Maybe they're not 'books,' but 'Acme Novelty Library' and 'Eightball' are two comics I can't get enough of.

The most impactful comics that I've read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world.

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

There are some short stories in R. Crumb comics that are just wonderful and touch me in ways no other comics do.