Toyin Odutola Quotes

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.

Nick Cardy's work helped define some of the things we see in comics today and take for granted. He broke out of the mold in terms of covers and layout and created a truly interactive experience for the reader that directly points back to his time with the Eisner studio.

Writing comics and drawing comics is a really very specific art form. It's a lot easier to get it wrong than it is to get it right.

And I've never viewed comics as assignments for the client.

'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' is my first book, and it's the fulfillment of a life-long dream. I had always wanted to be a cartoonist, but I found that it was very tough to break into the world of newspaper syndication. So I started playing with a style that mixed cartoons and 'traditional' writing, and that's how 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' was born.

My two biggest influences are Archie comics and Dennis the Menace.

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.

Gene Colan was like no other artist of his generation. His ability to create dramatic, multi-valued tonal illustrations using straight India ink and board was unparalleled.

To my mind, the most successful and the best comic book illustrators are those who translate the real world into a consistent code. If you look at Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, their drawings look nothing like the real world, but they are internally consistent. In terms of a comic book it can work just fine.

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.

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

I just love comic books. I've always loved comic book art, and I just think it's amazing.

Personally, I'd never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.

I really like the look of old '70s and '80s Japanese comics, so I think that style is something I will continue to draw.

Comics are a particularly esoteric field where you really learn how to do it, by doing it or by learning from other practitioners.

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.

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

I've read comics all my life and have wanted to write a comic for as long as I can remember. Alex Barnaby and Sam Hooker seemed like the perfect team to make the move into the graphic medium.

Graphic novels and comic books, by and large, as you know, have cover art, and they have interior art. The interior art is never as detailed as the cover art.

I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel.

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.

I've always preferred comics that really rely on visual storytelling. It's what makes comics special. Otherwise, you're better off reading a novel.

I do love sparse cartooning.