Indie Comics Quotes

Bryan Lee O'Malley has been alive since he was born and will lives until he dies.

I never thought I would work in mainstream superhero comics or Valiant or Marvel. I just set out to make the kinds of stories I wanted to make, which at the beginning was small personal stuff like 'Essex County.'

I don't think there's any independent cartoonist whose stuff I don't like or respect in at least some way or another. We're all marginal laborers - we're practically medical oddities - so I don't see why we can't all be nice to each other.

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.

There are so many books I love for different reasons. For superhero stuff, I always go back to Alan Moore's 'Watchmen' or his 'Swamp Thing' run. Those are my two favorites, and there are indie books that I really love, like Eddie Campbell's 'Alec' books and 'From Hell.'

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.

I started 'American Born Chinese' as a mini-comic. I would write and draw a chapter, photocopy a hundred or so copies at the corner photocopy store, and then try to sell them on consignment through local comics shops. If I could sell maybe half a dozen, I'd be doing okay.

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.

I came up with American Splendor. Some people think it's American Squalor.

I started off doing indie comics that I wrote and drew myself. I was doing those for ten years before I started to work for DC. The first book that I wrote for DC was for another artist. I did some backups in 'Adventure Comics' years ago starring The Atom. That's the first time that I ever wrote for another artist.

I would not be in comics if it weren't for independent creators like Kate Beaton, Jess Fink, and Emily Carroll. That's where I found my start and inspiration, through women who did it themselves and built a career on their own terms.

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

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

I like Comixology and I think they have a very captive audience which is good and bad. I hope that getting my books on there expose folks who just read Marvel/DC/Image to try something different.

If you want to, if you are a crazy person, you could go from idea to the stands in about four months. It does not cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a comic the way it does to make a television show or a movie.

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.