Scott McCloud Quotes

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

I don't like 'graphic novel.' It's a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating - it's just a media type.

I think the problem with the term graphic novel is it sounds pompous, it sounds pretentious, whereas on the continent, they call it an album, which to me sounds, it's got more much of a connotation of a kind of a music single and an album collection.

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.

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.

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 don't work without the visuals, obviously.

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.

Writing a graphic novel is hard. It feels closer to a screen play than to a novel.

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.

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

Dialogue is one of the easiest ways to get character conflict across immediately in comics.

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

Comics are just another medium to express yourself. It's not cinema; it's not literature; it's just something else. It has a specific requirement, which is that images are used to tell the story. There are lots of crappy movies, with guns and action and Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever.

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

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?

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.

The only place where you can really surprise or shock the reader, or make someone laugh, is on the lower righthand corner - the very last panel - so as you turn the page, the payoff is in the upper lefthand panel. To pace every story so that there's a setup and a payoff at the page turn was a huge challenge; it's a part of the medium and you really have to learn what can be done in the medium.

Something you can do in a comic that you can't do in a film is that you can have thought bubbles.

At the very core of what a comic is, time and space are kind of the same thing. When your reader moves her eyes across the page, she should be moving through time in your story.

I never feel there's anything I can't do with comics. There are certain things in comics that you can't do in any other medium: for instance, in Mister Wonderful, Marshall's narration overlaps the events as they're going on. That would be difficult in film; you could blot speech out with a voiceover, but it wouldn't have the same effect. That's always of interest, to see what new things you can do in comics form.

What is interesting is that John Lewis actually got interested initially in the civil rights movement because of a comic book. So part of it, he's paying homage to this tradition that you can tell serious stories and talk about serious issues in graphic form.

Still,[...] in all forms of comics the sequential artist relies upon the tacit cooperation of the reader. This cooperation is based upon the convention of reading and the common cognitive disciplines. Indeed, it is this very voluntary cooperation, so unique to comics, that underlies the contract between artist and audience.

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.