Comic Format Quotes

More and more, I tried to make comics in the way I like to read comics, and I found that when I read comics that are really densely packed with text, it may be rewarding when I finally do sit down and read it, but it never is going to be the first I'm going to read, and I never am fully excited to just sit down and read that comic.

My works were not - and they still aren't - single panel gags with a punch line underneath them. I like a lot of those cartoons; I just don't draw them.

Some comics are made to be displayed digitally, and it doesn't degrade them.

I think a lot of the bells and whistles that become available to you would be impossible to resist for some people, so it's just never going to be a real stand-in version of your comic. People will have to take advantage of the ability to have sound, or zoom in and out, whatever it is.

One of the things that I have learned since trying to bring in an interesting story in under 28 pages is that we already agree on great chunks of typical superhero stories.

Maybe there will always be a market for the regular comic books because you can read [them] at your own pace. You can save them, collect them, [then] go back and read them again.

I'm a graphic-novel guy. I can't handle the wait for monthly or bi-monthly comics; I need the story finished so I can buy the whole thing.

I like collecting comics, I like buying comics, I like looking at comics, but I also read comics on digital readers, so any way people read comics is fine with me. Digital is just helping people who might not necessarily have access to comics help them; that's great.

I do get the comics online I guess but it's such a pain. I'd rather just get them in the paper and read them.

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.

When I started doing 'The City' in 1990, most papers ran it the width of the page, 10 inches or so. It was great! I had lots of room to draw and write. It was the golden age of weekly comix. Today, most run my strip half that size. I just try to make it legible. It's very frustrating.

I'm not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.

I used to publish these stories in 32-page comics, and I would either do short stories or break the long ones up into chunks so there would be some variety inside the comic. But since then, people have been doing more and more long, standalone works, and the term 'graphic novel' has sort of become the codified term now.

I'm more into graphic novels than comic books.

I lose patience with long stories. I get people who go, "Crumb, do some long stories, do a graphic novel." Novel-schmovel.

I think the graphic novel form works, in practice, a lot differently from watching a movie. You can put it down and pick it back up whenever you want - something you can't do in a theater.

The difference between graphic novels and web comics is even greater than graphic novels and story boarding. Web comics really is a legitimately separate genre.

With comics you can put interesting and solid information in a format that's pretty palatable.

In my head, scenes are shot from certain angles; there are camera pans, all of that kind of stuff. Converting those visuals to comic format was mostly a matter of adapting them to the rhythm of paneling.

I love a nicely designed paper comic but I don't need to own them. To me, comics are about reading them. If I can get that on a tablet and not have another pile of paper under my coffee table, then I will opt for digital.

I think of myself as a theatre comic instead of club comic because I tend to talk for a bit before I start being funny. I don't really do the one-liners and five second bits or whatever. But it's good to work stuff out sometimes.

The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.