A Quote by Scott McCloud
I had a lot of ideas on how comics worked and pretty early on I had this idea that it would be fun to explain them in comics form.
Related Quotes
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.
The people who worked in comics were terrific guys. I had a good association with them, and I enjoyed comics for that very reason.
I had thought comics could only be one thing, and that was what mainstream comics were selling us. And the undergrounders proved anything you had in your head, as long as you had the skill to put it down on paper, was fair game. And I started filling sketchbooks with my own comics.
When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.
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.
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.'
A lot of the comics called me Bronco because I wouldn't get off - if I had to do an hour, I would stand there, even if it wasn't going well. I knew comics that would climb out of dressing room windows after they'd done their first spot.
I like collecting comics, I like buying comics, I like looking at comics, but I also read comics on digital readers, so any way people read comics is fine with me. Digital is just helping people who might not necessarily have access to comics help them; that's great.
I don't think comics use iconic forms - or they don't have to. But that makes them even more "cool," if I understand the idea. One has to be quite involved to make comics work. Signals have to be decoded on both the verbal and visual level, simultaneously, and the reader must do a lot of cognitive work between panels as well. Comics definitely need an engaged reader.
I actually come from comics, and I'm big on comics. I was reading 'Walking Dead' from the beginning. Then just being on the show, I was really lucky to work on episodes like 'Pretty Much Dead Already' and 'Clear.' I worked a lot on episodes that I didn't write.
I think comics in New York are interested in being comics. And there're comics in L.A. who are touring comics, who are certainly more interested in stand-up, but a lot of L.A. stand-ups are really looking to do something else.
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.
I was going to be a storybook illustrator or an editorial illustrator. I ended up in a comics class by mistake because all the others were full, so I was like 'I'll stay for one class, and then I'll go take something else, because I don't care about comics.' I got pulled in really fast; I discovered I had a voice in comics that I didn't know I had.
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.
I never feel there's anything I can't do with comics. There are certain things in comics that you can't do in any other medium: for instance, in Mister Wonderful, Marshall's narration overlaps the events as they're going on. That would be difficult in film; you could blot speech out with a voiceover, but it wouldn't have the same effect. That's always of interest, to see what new things you can do in comics form.
Since I started as a comic person then became a musician to me it was interesting because I have this really great, interesting fanbase that's really smart and energetic and uh how could I steer them towards a medium that shaped who I was? You know, steer them toward comics. That was really the goal, to bring a lot of readers cuz they were reading a lot of comics but most of them hadn't been reading American comics, they'd be reading manga sitting on the floor of a Barnes and Noble.
Related Authors
Adrian Tomine Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Alison Bechdel Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Bill Watterson Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Bryan Lee O'Malley Quotes
Canadian
Cartoonist
Cathy Guisewite Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Charles M. Schulz Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Gary Larson Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Jack Kirby Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Lynda Barry Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Matt Groening Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Michael Leunig Quotes
Australian
Cartoonist
Randall Munroe Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Roz Chast Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Scott Adams Quotes
American
Cartoonist
Seth Quotes
Canadian
Cartoonist
Seth MacFarlane Quotes
American
Cartoonist