A Quote by Rob Liefeld
My role as an artist helps me tremendously in breaking down each story. Pacing, layout, movement - having drawn a few thousand pages, I understand the language of comic books very well.
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"March" was inspired by "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story." I actually first heard about that comic from John Lewis, who told me that it played an important role in the movement. And so once he told me about that, it made me start thinking, "Well, why doesn't John Lewis write his own comic book?".
For me, Iris West was traditionally white in the comic books. So, you know, comic book fans are very opinionated, very vocal. So it was very scary stepping into that role when I started the show.
I changed the layout of comic books in general. When I came in, layout design wasn't really part of what you did. It was all just panels, panels, panels. So when I came in, I thought, 'Nah, let's change that,' and I designed the page.
I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.
I'm a storyteller, and as a story-teller, you see that each country, and therefore the language that it speaks has its very own way and very unique way of telling a story. And there's a lot to be learned from each country, and each language, and how they tell a story.
To me the drawn language is a very revealing language: one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.
Language is what books do very well and movement is what movies does very well.
It's not like what I do, how I write, changes depending on the nature of the project. I give each story my all, regardless of if there are a few thousand people reading it or a few hundred thousand.
I try to weave a secret into each plot. It's the thread that holds the rest of the story fabric together. In fact, it's the reason for the story. I hint at the secret early on. Immediately I want the reader to get the feeling that something here isn't quite right. It helps maintain the suspense if a puzzling element is introduced in the first few pages of the book, but the answer isn't revealed until the final ones. Hopefully, readers want to know what the heck is really going on, and it's the desire to find out that keeps them turning pages.
Comic books sort of follow with the move - if people see the movie and if they're interested in the character and want to see more of the character, they start buying the comic books. So a good movie helps the sale of the comic books and the comic books help the movie and one hand washes the other. So, I don't think there's any reason to think that comics will die out.
It's like the query letter problem that I just mentioned, magnified a hundredfold. You might be good at telling a story, but that doesn't mean you know anything about marketing. Or layout. Or editing. Or publicity. Or selling your books for foreign markets.Everyone can point to a few examples of people that have done very well for themselves self-publishing. But honestly, those folks are lucky as lottery winners.
And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to a movement for each person and open for everybody.
There's a page in #2 where I did one of the most interesting pages I've ever drawn. I had to think, "This is a big, blockbuster comic book." You're prepared to be more fan service-y or bombastic. Yet I did one of the most challenging pages I've ever drawn, and it was incredibly satisfying to do that on a project like this [All-Star Batman].
With each of those projects I wasn't thinking about how the layout would really affect the story I was working on - it wasn't the content that was affecting the layout, it was, how I wanted to draw at that point in time.
Writing something down and processing it, sitting with a text and a story, editing and rewriting new drafts - that entire process helps clarify something for myself. Depending on the person, the act of trying to tell your story helps you understand yourself better, helps you come to terms with something that happened.
I am proud of having drawn the first comic about a lesbian - and it didn't even occur to me that I was drawing a first. I just wanted to tell the story of my roommate.
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