Travis Beacham Quotes

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

Space does for comics what time does for film!

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

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

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.

Comics are a wonderful form. You can do so much with it.

In a film we have limited time and space to say what we have to, hence the visual language and brevity needs to be paramount. In a novel, however, we can dissect each thought and emotion and build on it.

When I'm writing comics, I'm also visualizing how the story will look on the page - not even always art-wise, but panel-wise, like how a moment will be enhanced dramatically by simply turning a page and getting a reveal. It requires thinking about story in a way I never had to consider when I was writing prose.

When you're writing TV or movies your vernacular is time, it's all based on rhythms, a character takes a beat or two characters have a moment, like everything is about time. And when you're writing a comic, everything is about space. It's how many panels to put on a page, when should you do a full page splash, what is the detail that you see in any particular image.

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.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.

Some of my earliest work was in comics. I tend to think in pictures and always like to write scenes possessing the dynamic you find in comics.

Comics is a great medium to get a lot of stories out.

In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.

I think you can do anything with comics that you could do in just about any art form.

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.

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

Comics are not theatre - there's a very important difference in that the reader controls the page. You can linger on a page of comics as long as you want. You can read and go forward and then move back; you can reread, in one sitting or at your leisure. You can take as much time as you want to take in that story.

But again, I put in my time with Marvel and DC so there was that period of my life of trying to learn how to draw and tell stories in a proper fashion.

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.

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

I don't think of myself as having any freedom when it comes to how 'Monstress' is structured and how the story is going because a comic book has to be even more tightly structured than a novel, because there is no room for mistakes. Once the art is done, the art is done.