A Quote by Harvey Pekar

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. — © Harvey Pekar
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.
The first time I shopped at a comic shop, it was because I had been published in a comic book. As I became more involved in comics, I started going more and more, usually to support my friends or lady-friendly comics.
To me, my favorite comic book movies were the ones that were never based on comic books, like Unforgiven. That's more the kind of thing that get us inspired. Usually when you say something's a comic book movie, it means you turn on the purple and green lights. Suddenly that means it's more like a comic book, and It's not really like that.
I love the comics so much, and I grew up reading Marvel Comics. And Doctor Strange is my favorite comic book character - probably, I think honestly, the only comic book I would feel personally suited to work on.
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 actually imagined 'Thunderbolts' as a straight-up comedy book in a lot of ways, like a very dark comedy book, whereas 'Red Lanterns' is more of a cosmic saga that has some jokes every once in a while.
My brother had a big comic book chest, and he kept the key in the exact same place. So when he would leave for camp or be gone for a few days at a friend's house, I would totally sneak into that room and open the comic book chest and see 'X-Men' and 'Sandman' and all the Neil Gaiman stuff and all the Marvel stuff and some old 'Thor' comics.
The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.
When I was a kid, back in the '40s, I was a voracious comic book reader. And at that time, there was a lot of patriotism in the comics. They were called things like 'All-American Comics' or 'Star-Spangled Comics' or things like that. I decided to do a logo that was a parody of those comics, with 'American' as the first word.
To my mind, the most successful and the best comic book illustrators are those who translate the real world into a consistent code. If you look at Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, their drawings look nothing like the real world, but they are internally consistent. In terms of a comic book it can work just fine.
And as a stand-up comic, that's the one thing I'm a little uncomfortable with. I'm not uncomfortable with sincerity in my regular life, but, like in terms of my product that I offer, I think that it's weird, because comics used to be way more sincere in the '80s.
'Comic book' has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call 'Die Hard' a 'comic-book movie,' when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told.
"Comic book" has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call Die Hard "a comic-book movie," when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told.
As things have progressed and I've gotten older, I've gotten more and more involved on the producing side. It's been a natural progression. The more you become exposed in a particular medium, the more you can bring to the table and people start trusting you. You're valued a little bit more, so you have more of a voice. It's something I would like to do, through the rest of my career.
We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
If you behave like a regular guy, you get treated like a regular guy. You can't cut yourself off from the world. You ultimately would go crazy, wouldn't you?
If you can take something as ultimately frivolous [as a comic book] in the cosmic scale of things in the universe and what's important - people being born and dying and everything else that's gonna happen today - if one gay kid in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, reads an X-Men comic and feels for a second like maybe they're not entirely alone in the world - that's amazing. I'll take it. Whatever size victory that is, I will take.
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