Comics Industry Quotes

My only problem with fans is when they turn pro. For example, when all the professional writers were fired by DC in the '60s, they brought in a generation of comic book fans who would have paid to have written these stories.

Certainly, my many years working in the comics industry, creating products that I do not own, has made me rather fierce on the subject of giving up rights.

Look at 'Avatar:' the foreign ticket sales were over twice the domestic returns. The mind boggles at those kinds of numbers, but that's what you get when you effectively reach out to a global audience. If that kind of thing came to comics, it would undoubtedly change how people perceive the mainstream industry.

Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.

I started in comics in 2005, ten years ago, and at that time, I didn't have a cell phone. I don't even think I had a computer myself, you know. And just in those ten years, how much technology has changed.

I've gotten more and more cut off from the regular comic-book world, from straight comics and stuff like that. Once in a while, I'll take a look at something.

Dwayne McDuffie was one of my favorite writers. When I was growing up, he was one of the few African Americans working in American comics.

I knew I really wanted to work in comics in 1979.

In America, there's a very long tradition of a comic strip that comes in newspapers, which is not true all over the world. To sell papers, they put color comics in. It's worked, up until now. Now these papers can't afford it. They always had minuscule ad budgets, and now the things which people probably read these papers for are gone.

When I was a young artist, I liked and was interested in belonging to the mainstream comics group. I didn't introduce myself as an author, but only as a designer.

I do worry that beginning cartoonists could feel somewhat strangled by the increasing critical seriousness comics has received of late and feel, like younger writers, that they have to have something to "say" before they set pen to paper. Many cartoonists feel even more passionate about this idea than I do, vehemently insisting that comics are inherently "non-art" and poop humor or whatever it is they think it is, but that attitude is a little like insisting that all modern writing should always take the form of The Canterbury Tales.

Women have been writing strong women characters for a long time - hello, Maxine Hong Kingston! - it's just taken mainstream comics a really long while to catch up.

I'm contractually not allowed to work in comics in the United States other than for Marvel.

At the end of the '60s, I was trying to enter the world of comics.

I'd love to see more equal representation of female and male cartoonists on the comics page.

At some point, all comics have to go out and be retail salesmen doing door-to-door. And this idea of somebody who totally knows their craft having to get up for free in front of a crowd to work out some stuff they're thinking in their head, still, after as much success as you can get, is really interesting.

I've seen a tremendous shift especially in indie comics. I see all these young women who are out there creating. They're making these great web comics. Their graphic novels are getting published. They're making all this wonderful art. They're powerful. There's this vital energy about it that's really, really beautiful that years ago I knew existed but I didn't see so clearly.

I broke into comics by working as a press reporter for the industry, for a trade press in comics, and reporting on events and reporting on books and so forth, and I got to know some of the editors at DC Comics in the mid-'80s.

It's not easy to convey to someone who doesn't read comics just how Alan Moore has dominated the field since 'Watchmen.'

The only real reason that I'd have for working for Hollywood is the fantastic amounts of money involved, and that isn't enough of an incentive to really give up the degree of control that I have over my work at the moment with comics. I suppose that's probably why I don't have any designs on being a screenwriter.

It's an incredibly supportive and friendly field. Older people want to foster and help younger people. Which is not true of all creative fields, but it is true of comics, and it is true of radio.

I was a very sickly kid. While I was in the hospital at age seven, my Dad brought me a stack of comic books to keep me occupied. And I was hooked. When my eighth grade art teacher, Mr. Smedley, told me he thought I had actual art talent, I decided to devote all my efforts in that direction in the hope that I might someday get into the comics biz. I became an art major, took every art class my school had to offer. In college, I majored in Advertising Art and Design.

I quit comics because I got completely sick of it. I was drawing comics all the time and didn't have the time or energy to do anything else. That got to me in the end. I never made enough money from comics to be able to take a break and do something else. Now I just can't stand comics. . . . I wish my work would be recognized by a larger crowd of people as more art than be stuck with the cartoonist label for the rest of my life.

I'm very distanced from the comics industry. I love the comics medium, but I have no time for the industry.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.