A Quote by Jeff Lemire

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 guess my journey with comics began with stuff like Spider-Man and Batman. I started off with mainstream superhero stuff, which I've never abandoned.
I grew up on monthly comics. My closet is full of monthly comics. I've always wanted to do a monthly comic, and while I've had a couple of offers, the timing has never worked out. Most superhero comics come into the world as monthly series, so we wanted the same for 'The Shadow Hero.'
I had no confusion about making a superhero film. From the very day one, I knew I will make a movie of this genre which will have an Indian superhero. I never wanted to copy my superhero from any of the Hollywood ones.
The good part of what comics trains you to do is it trains you - especially if you've worked in mainstream comics like Marvel and DC, or if you're just doing your own independent comics - to compartmentalize things and work on multiple things at the same time. And that's a skill that is incredibly handy in Hollywood, because within the first year that you get here, you realize there's a reason why every successful person in Hollywood has like seven or eight projects up in the air at any point.
You meet people who are great to hang with, and you just want to make stuff. So, you just make stuff. I never would have seen that coming. I guess at this point, I can't say that I'm really picky about it. If someone wants to work with me, I'm psyched. As far as who I might call, I don't know. I've never thought about it. Maybe I don't feel like I'm able to ask. That hasn't crossed my mind. I'm that girl who waits to be invited to the dance. I'm not doing any inviting myself, if that makes any sense.
Although humor is present in every one of my films, it has always been used as a way to make the darker, heavier stuff in my stories more palatable. I never set out to make 'Humpday' a comedy.
I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. I always wanted to pursue either music or comics, so when the opportunity came from comics publisher Fantagraphics for my brothers Jaime and Mario and I to make a comic book together, we jumped at the chance: "Let's just do it and see what happens." Really, we weren't sure where we were going to go with it. We thought our work was good enough to be out there, but we didn't know that the response was going to be pretty good, pretty quick.
There are many stories of people didn't set out to make a film that became a classic - the whole process was a disaster, everybody hated each other, the movie itself was a disaster, everybody thought the movie and the script was going to be a piece of crap. Look at Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho. Nobody wanted to make Psycho; it was crap to them. The only person that wanted to make Psycho was Hitchcock. Now, it's considered a classic and a work of art.
All I wanted to do was be a professional film director with a body of work, and you're going to make some good films, some bad and some indifferent. You don't set out to make a dog, you set out to make something good. But I like them all.
There's a Marvel superhero called Black Bolt & his real name is Blackagar Boltagon & that really tells you a lot about superhero comics.
I have grown up reading Marvel Comics and Marvel movies with their intricately woven storylines. It is fascinating to see how Marvel has created characters and stories that resonate so well with audiences across the globe, making movies at a scale that one had never before imagined.
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 prime reason behind making 'A Flying Jatt' was that there are barely any 'desi' superhero films in Bollywood which Indians can relate to. I wanted to exhibit that a superhero is more than just superpowers and leads a normal life like the others do. I wanted to attach a human factor to a superhero.
I've been blessed with enough wealth that I can make a film myself up to a certain budget. So one way I thought I would reinvent myself was just to make these very small, personal films that I've financed myself.
If we wanted to make it the way I imagined I knew that we would have to wake up earlier and start very early. So we prep like crazy. And the competition you have is like Avatar, you have Star Wars, you have all the big Marvel stuff. So if you want to come in the race, you know, don't be pretentious.
Lots of things that go on in mainstream superhero comics are just stupid. They just show up on the page, and no one makes any mention of it.
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