Ben Katchor Quotes

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

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 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.

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.

All of the characters at Marvel were my ideas, but the ideas meant nothing unless I had somebody who could illustrate it.

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.

I love storytelling so for me to get behind a story and get in there early in its infancy and kind of develop it in the early stages was something I really wanted to be a part of.

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

The way that I sort of direct the writers is, let's do the best story we can. Let's not worry about production issues. 'How much will that cost? How are we going to shoot that?' Let's not set up those constraints on the writing. I don't think it helps the project to work like that.

I like the story writing process. I usually use someone who has been trained for structure to take the story that I actually want, place those elements in the right places.

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.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.

I was able to accomplish pretty much everything I set out to do with my run on Superman, and I'm really proud of how it turned out. I hope that readers enjoyed it, too!

Comics have always been storyboards.

I love the early process of asking questions about a story and deciding which questions matter most.

I know a lot of people who read 'Sweet Tooth' are the kind of people who don't read a lot of other comics. Whatever it was, I'm just glad it happened.

I leave the story room to grow into what the movie is driving me to do.

It's just my goal to deliver the best story I can, and I want to make sure each book is better than the last, and in order to do that, I have to take chances.

I start each of my scripts by going on a journey of painstaking research and discovery, much as I do a piece of long-lead journalism.

In an early version of the story, I thought Aang could shepherd a herd of twenty bison.

The reason I love comics and have collected them for 37 years is because I always wanted to be an illustrator and a writer - and comics are really the perfect blend of those two mediums.

The movies sort of tell you what they want to be as you're writing them.

When I was doing 'Baahubali 2,' the story was being discussed with many people. The story evolved over 9-10 months in that way.