Walt Handelsman Quotes

'American Dad' is, by its nature, much more political.

A sketch is just a mini movie.

I also love the makers of South Park, because they're political, strong, and they're making all of these comments that would get you shot for if you did it in a drama.

Mark Twain had a way of telling stories that shifts your consciousness away from labels.

Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.

Drawings don't have a point. Cartoons, you want to have an opinion; you want them to express a viewpoint.

There is too much illustrating of the news these days. I look at many editorial cartoons and I don't know what the cartoonists are saying or how they feel about a certain issue.

When I did 'Esquire,' I did a lot of celebrity covers, but the celebrity cover was Hubert Humphrey as a dummy, sitting on Lyndon Johnson's lap and aping his feelings about the war. I did celebrity covers that made a difference in what was going on in American culture.

Editorial cartoons should be smart and substantive, provocative and informative. They should stir passions and deep emotions. Editorial cartoons should be the catalyst for thought, and frankly speaking, if you can make politicians think, that is an accomplishment itself.

The sizes and shapes of the panels have never been important to my stories. It has always been the words and images that drew me in, kind of like watching a movie.

I always wanted to do an animated movie. I find it to be incredibly liberating as a way of telling a story.

Editorial cartoons are about concept. The illustration is merely a vehicle to convey a point of view. We're here to protect and inform the public, to attack and repel those who do not agree with our long-term shared interest.

I did 32 years of political cartoons, one every day for six days a week, I wrote and drew every word, every line. That body of work is the one I'm proudest of.

Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert. Those are the guys I look at who are telling me pretty much the truth. And they throw humor into it which makes it much more interesting to listen to.

Animation had been done before, but stories were never told.

The power of story and the power of a well-crafted film or television show is really all you need to speak to people. I think Hollywood is sort of catching up to that.

People really love editorial cartoons, and I think publishers understand that.

It's not movies and it's not "fine art." The beauty of a comic is that it's clear, direct communication. My work is getting simpler and more cartoony because I'm much more interested in communication now than in any illustrative value.

The magic of comics is that there are three people involved in any comic. There's whoever's writing it and whoever's drawing it. And then there's whoever's reading it because they are creating the movement. They are creating the illusion of time passing.

I am not one to generalize, but cartoonists, as a group, exhibit a level of social sophistication generally associated with pie fights. In high school, when the future lawyers were campaigning for class president, the future cartoonists were painstakingly altering illustrations in their history books so that Robert E. Lee appeared to be performing an illegal act with his horse.

I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.

A good picture book can almost be whistled. ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling.

In folk music, I've always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don't know anything about the characters, you don't know what they're doing, but they're doing something important. I love that. I'm really a sucker for that kind of song.

The extraordinary thing about comic books and graphic novels is that they cannot exist without the art. If my words disappeared tomorrow, well, whatever. This is a visual medium in which the eye and the mind work together to bear witness to story, to lives.

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.