Jeff Lemire Quotes

Cartoonists' dirty secret is that we tend to come up with stories that involve things that are really fun to draw.

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

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.

But to me what seems to be missing in a lot of portfolios is Cartooning.

Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.

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

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue.

Coming from the world of animation, every single line counts; every single gesture counts. You put thought into every single one of those things and the way a frame is composed.

Throughout my career, when I was finished with the drawing for one film I would go up to the story department and help develop sequences. Sometimes these were for scenes that I would animate later on.

When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.

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

I don't do storyboarding, ever; I'm not interested in that.

My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling.

Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.

Working at Pixar has been like my graduate school for screenwriting.

When I was a kid, I could draw, and my ambition was to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw comics. But I also liked newspaper comics.

I have a paper, pencil, and ink sketch for a Mickey Mouse cartoon short entitled 'Mickey's Garden' from 1935.

To be an animator you have to be able to tell stories but I'm not very verbal - I definitely do it through pictures.

Animation is incredibly difficult - much like doing a giant sweeping fantasy novel.

I'm an artist. I've been doing storyboards for a long, long time.

A big part of directing animation is deciding what you really want to do and making sure it's about something. My favorite thing about animation is the storytelling. You can really dig into the story and spend time with the writers. The writers don't just write and leave.

As long as I can recall I've always wanted to make cartoons.

You know, comics were created at the same time as the cinema. And the cinema very quickly became a major art. Cartooning didn't become a major art. There's a reason for that. People don't know how to deal with drawings.

There's a certain visual grammar you've got to stick in. For example, if a character has just woken up, draw him in his pajamas with the bed a bit rumpled. Or if he's ill, draw little bottles with red crosses on that immediately communicate medicine, and a box of tissues.