A Quote by Ted Naifeh

I dug up some old John Buscema 'Conan' comics. Man, when Alfredo Alcala was inking, that was some of the most beautiful black and white comic art ever published. The stories are good, too, though early '70s comics based on Conan is a festival of sexist, racist stereotypes.
I got into comics about the same time as music. By 12 years old, I had discovered my dad's killer comic book collection filled with Silver Age books from his youth...early Spider-Man, Thor, Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Detective Comics, Action Comics, you name it. Seeing those old books got me interested in new comics, so my friends and I would hit the local comic shop every Saturday to pick up the cool titles of my generation.
There are a lot of good comics, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics - there are black comics that work only black crowds, gay comics that do only gay crowds, and southern comics that only work down South, and so on with Asian, Latino, Indian, midgets, etc. The previous generation's comics were better because they had to make everybody laugh.
When 'Watchmen' was published in 1986, the vast majority of comics readers deemed it a watershed in comics history. The 12-part serial comic book was widely acclaimed as a genius subversion of the superhero genre, and it did much to popularize comics to adults.
Comics as art. I do comics as comics, and my opportunity to tell stories. Simple. Basic. Let the characters have the excitement, not the package. That's where I come from.
I tend to bristle at people praising alt comics as some kind of perfect comics paradigm, because there's quite a lot of misogyny in its history as well. Like, in my first comics class, every single great comic creator we studied was male.
I read a lot and fell in love with comics and science fiction. I even self-published some of my comics when I was 16 or 17.
Comic books themselves are getting more literate. And there are people who are screenwriters and television writers and novelists who are writing for the comics, for some reason, they love doing it and some of the art work in the comics, I mean it rivals anything you'll see hanging on the walls of museums, they're illustrations more than drawings and all the people are discovering this and they're turning on to it.
Honestly, before I started working at the comic shop, I was not a huge comic reader. I grew up reading 'Archie' and have an incredible love/hate relationship with Archie Comics. I got back into it when I started living with some roommates who were really comics fanatics.
I was always most interested in drawing - most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside.
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.
The lovely thing about writing comics for so many years is that comics is a medium that is mistaken for a genre. It's not that there are not genres within comics, but because comics tend to be regarded as a genre in itself, content becomes secondary; as long as I was doing a comic, people would pick it up.
For a lot of comics who aren't as silly or physical but more intellectual, we get looked at as 'alt comics.' No, I'm still a black comic, and there are black people who want to hear my type of black comedy, but that space hasn't been built out for us.
In early comics, you see the amazing awkwardness and bizarre reasoning in the storyline, and it's because comics hadn't really been invented yet. There was no format for them to follow. They were just making it up. So I try to incorporate that kind of awkwardness in my comics quite frequently, which is odd. In some ways, I can't be as awkward as I'd like. But I do think that's one way in which my comics are unusual, because I will try to make the artwork look bad, occasionally.
The dirty little secret about comics is that the wall to getting published is actually not that high. You can publish your own comic. You can have your comic printed by the same people that print Marvel and DC and Image's comics for, I think, it's about $2,000 for a print run. So you can Kickstart it and get your own comic made. It depends on what is considered success to you. So if you need to be published by the Big Two to feel that you've made it, well, you should start working very hard.
There are some short stories in R. Crumb comics that are just wonderful and touch me in ways no other comics do.
Self-publishing in comics is core to the whole artform. There is no scarlet letter in comics as there still is, to some degree, in prose. As no publisher for a long time would publish serious work in comics, the only way a lot of it came out was because of self-publishing. Many of the greatest works of the medium are self-published.
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