Alternative Comics Quotes

I was sort of on a mission with 'American Splendor.' I wanted to try to prove that comics could do things. I wanted to expand them beyond superheroes and talking animals. And I knew that was going to take a long time. But I just started writing an autobiography about my quotidian life.

Maybe they're not 'books,' but 'Acme Novelty Library' and 'Eightball' are two comics I can't get enough of.

The popularity of '2 Dope Queens' just showed there was like a hunger for new stories because we have alternative comics on our show that wouldn't normally be featured on, like, a white guy's comedy show.

In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.

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.

Of course, I started really being a comics fan with the underground stuff in the '70s.

I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.

Oh, I was never a very big Jim Woodring fan. I've never thought his work was that great.

Just about everything put out by Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics is what I keep up with. And once in a while, I'll read the more mainstream comics - I like Grant Morrison's writing and some of Warren Ellis' stuff, although maybe they're more on the fringe of the mainstream.

The type of cartooning that I think is generally referred to as 'alternative' or 'underground' is usually - the distinction is usually in terms of whether it's made by one person, the entire thing is done by one hand or more of a production line process, which is how the comics that we grew up reading were made.

When people say 'What are underground comics?' I think the best way you can define them is just the absolute freedom involved... we didn't have anyone standing over us.

It's just an easy catchall to describe a style because there are a lot of alternative comics who are completely different from each other.

But there's still an avenue for smaller comics and personal expression.

My creator owned books sell better than my mainstream books. And that makes no sense.

I was never one of the cool kids who read '2000 AD.'

Leslie Stein's comics give readers privileged access to a complete and wholly original world of gently skewed wonders.

It's embarrassing to be involved in the same business as the mainstream comic thing. It's still very embarrassing to tell other adults that I draw comic books - their instant, preconceived notions of what that means.

There are really funny alternative comics and really funny straight comics who write and perform traditionally.

I'd begun reading Crumb shortly before that, and other underground stuff, so that was an influence to some degree. Of course the Marvel and DC comics, they had been my main interests in my teenage years.

Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers.

Once we got going on the Fantagraphics version of Love and Rockets, our encouragement was constant. People wanted us to do more, do more. Thirty years later, here we are.

Comics shouldn't be 'tools' for anyone's agenda except for the characters. And I am speaking only of super hero action comics. I love many of the alternative comics that are like journalistic stories. Documentary comics, a mix of reportage and fiction. Those are just great.

I was just a guy who did adult or alternative comic books. And then suddenly to be, like, a New Yorker cover artist was a different thing.

Underground and alternative comics existed in a vacuum for years, where money really wasn't an issue. No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.

Things improved a little bit in the '80s; there was kind of a revival of alternative comics, but then they went downhill in the '90s.