Joe Simon Quotes

I'm very much influenced by your traditional comic book artists like Jack Kirby, Alex Toth and Walter Simonson. Their styles were sort of what I was gravitating towards.

I feel like there are comic book artists who are comic book artists, and then there's comic book artists who are cartoonists.

Comics are so full of amazing work. And I can't look at a drawing of a woman without thinking of, for instance, Wallace Wood and his amazing way of capturing beauty.

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.

When I started in the comic book business, 'Art Of' books were strictly the provenance of the greats, like Rembrandt and Da Vinci. But times change, and so do attitudes. Now the comic is considered an art form, and I hope 'A Life in Words and Pictures' contributes a little to that art form's history.

I'm supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing.

I think comics have far more potential than a lot of people realize.

Comics are my first love, and I hate seeing an art form that I love suffer.

I didn't read many comics as a kid - I've always been a really fast reader, and I would fly through a comic book in a few minutes and be so mad that it ended so quickly. But now that I've been in the business, I tend to look at the panels so much more carefully, and realize that so much of it is about the art; I don't think I got that before.

It wasn't until I went to my first comic convention while I was in high school that I got to see actual comic book artists and original artwork in real life, up close. That was when I first realized that this is what I wanted to do for a living.

People underestimate the complexity of comic books.

One of the reasons that DC, Marvel, and other comic book companies have always asked me to do covers and variant covers is because they know that when they tell me 'icon,' I jump over their words, and I give them an iconic cover - but while I'm doing it, there is going to be an idea there.

There's something about the comic book genre that I think is so cool and artsy and unique. It's not like anything else.

I came to think that nobody from England could draw American comic books, because they were clearly all done by this sort of Mafia, all these guys with Italian and Irish names who had the whole thing sewn up. It was actually seeing a comic book drawn by Barry Smith, who was about my age, and English.

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.

'Thunderbolts' I was mostly attracted to because I really wanted to write Punisher and Elektra and Deadpool, who are characters I have always really enjoyed. But the funny thing is that over time, I came to really like Red Leader; he became one of my favorite guys in the book. Sometimes characters surprise you.

I don't need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.

One of the key characteristics of the comic book medium is that it is not brought to life by just one voice.

For a long time I wanted to be a comic strip artist but when I started doing them in my teens they were getting really elaborate with tons of poses and a lot of information.

And that, to me, is the main attraction to comics. It's an avenue to say what you want to say.

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've always felt that the comic strip medium stands equally beside all the other story telling mediums: novels, movies, stage plays, opera, you know, you name it.

When I was a young artist, I liked and was interested in belonging to the mainstream comics group. I didn't introduce myself as an author, but only as a designer.

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.

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.