Marc Guggenheim Quotes

I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.

The key thing if you're a writer is to visualize the scene and convey it to the penciller and turn the penciller loose.

I thought I had a great opportunity when I started doing my comic book in 1972. I thought there was so much territory to work in.

Let me tell you, writing comics is as hard as anything I've ever done - for me, at least. I'm now officially in awe of guys who can crank out multiple books a month and maintain a high level of quality. Comics are completely different than any other medium I've dabbled in.

If you want to, if you are a crazy person, you could go from idea to the stands in about four months. It does not cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a comic the way it does to make a television show or a movie.

The most labor-intensive part of putting together a comic is the drawing.

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

There's no limitation on comics, nothing. From a logical standpoint, how can there be a limitation on comics? You can use any word in the dictionary. You can put them in any order you want to. You can use a vast variety of illustrating styles. People could do all sorts of things.

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.

In the Golden Age of Batman, I penciled, inked, and lettered my strip by myself.

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.

All of the penciling was consistently done by one person and the inking was whoever could finish on time.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far.

There's a good many pictures I'd like to make; we'll see how many I'll be allowed to make.

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.

With comics, you don't have to worry so much about budgetary constraints. In film and television, however fanciful you want to be, someone can come up to you and go, 'Okay, this is going to cost X amount of dollars, and we only have so many days to film this.' With graphic novels, you can have that alien invasion you've always wanted to see.

I grew up on monthly comics. My closet is full of monthly comics. I've always wanted to do a monthly comic, and while I've had a couple of offers, the timing has never worked out. Most superhero comics come into the world as monthly series, so we wanted the same for 'The Shadow Hero.'

There is a sequence in my 'Detective Comics' run where you can't find consecutive issues by the same artist. That's intentional. That was done on purpose.

You can sometimes break rules in comics that you can't necessarily break in cinema. It's fun to find something cool in a comic and then try and find a way to break the same rule in another medium.

I've written, like, 450 comics, and 'Secret Six' was the first one I've had ship late, ever. So it took a lot to make that happen. So we had a little bit of a stop-and-start, and then we had Convergence, and then Issue No. 2 of 'Secret Six'.

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.

It's absolutely chilling to think that I've been working on a comic-book series called 'Optic Nerve' since I was sixteen.

I'm happy I can sit home in my office and make up stories about superheroes. And I only have to deal with a pretty limited amount of people to get those comics produced.

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.