Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The problem with most digital comics is that you're simply taking print material and adapting it. It's like reading through a cardboard tube.
What sets 'Archie' apart from the many, many times I've reworked and rebooted long-standing characters is that this time, it was really scary.
The nice thing about working with BOOM! on 'Irredeemable' and 'Incorruptible,' man, was they let me have my head. No one said boo about anything.
I just love rolling up my sleeves and doing research, and I especially love doing research on the origins of folklore and the origins of mythology.
Super-heroes were created to represent the best in all of us. We should aspire to match their nobility, not their ability to shoot big chrome guns.
I'm a great salesman when I believe in a product that somebody else is producing, but I always feel very awkward and clumsy asking for money for my work.
Know what your characters want, know what they need most, know what they fear most, and don't be fearful of facing it, no matter how unpleasant it may be.
Style and entertainment tastes change, but the core emotions of being a kid - which, not coincidentally, are the core foundations of any good story - are constant.
If you're ruling the world, you can't trust anybody. Because even those who profess to be working in your interest - those are also villains in and of their own right.
If I wanted to write a bunch of comics about 50-year-olds sitting around having a conversation about politics, that would be realistic, but it'd be the dullest comic in the world.
I think there's a moral imperative when you're writing fictional heroes to give characters who somehow give us something to aspire to as opposed to dragging them down to our level.
I genuinely enjoy the puzzle put before me with a crossover - how do I use this bigger piece of the Marvel Universe to tell a character-based tale I wouldn't normally think to tell?
It's always an amazing gift to be able to work with storytellers who 'get it' and who can not only draw anything but can draw it better and more dynamically than you'd ever envisioned.
What's interesting is that younger characters just have a more vibrant, exciting point of view on the world. They are more emotional, they are more dramatic, and they are just electric.
Everyone knows what it's like to make the wrong decision for the right reasons. For me, wrong decisions are the heart of drama - a character who's always making the right decisions is boring.
The first rule of new media is nobody gets rich, but everybody gets paid, in a perfect world. Maybe you don't get fabulously wealthy doing your webcomic, but as long as you can make a decent living.
I got taught a lot of great lessons by superhero comics as a kid about virtue and self-sacrifice and responsibility. And those were an important part of imprinting my DNA with ethical and moral values.
Marvel has always been to a large extent the world around us. It has to be evocative of the world around us, the feelings people are feeling. You take real-world concerns and you put a Marvel face on it.
When you're writing a team book where every character already has his or her own series, you don't have dominion over them as individuals - but what you can exploit is their relationships with one another.
I don't know if you'd do a Marvel story on Ferguson, because it trivializes what the real flesh-and-blood people on the ground are doing there. But you can make an allegory and deal with the bigger questions.
Maybe this is because I'm a comics historian as much as anything else, but I really have a deep-seated respect for the characters that have been around since before I was born and are probably going to outlive me.
In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it.
Flash is about freedom; Flash is about expression. Flash is about just the joy of exuberant running and of freedom, and the moment you weight him down with too much Batman-like baggage... that's not the Flash anymore.
I like the brighter, shinier, happier comic-book material on a personal level, but I also think the best stories are told where you just don't know from page to page or moment to moment when the sucker-punches are coming.
When I first did 'Empire,' it was a severe break from everything I'd written up to that point, which is all very continuity-driven, super-heroic, and ethics and morals-infused. 'Empire' was a chance to break away from that.
It's Marvel's toybox; I'm just glad I'm able to play with the toys and have some impact on what goes on. I didn't create Daredevil, so I'm not about to stand here and say that I'm the only one who gets to play with the toy.
I'm a big veteran of being able to, in one comic, explain to you everything that you need to know to get forward in the story without you having to refer back to years of continuity and a universe in these superhero comics.
I think there are things that digital can't do as well as print thus far. Even an iPad is only 80% the size of a standard comics page, so the images are going to be smaller. You don't get your big, whopping two-page spreads.
When they first asked me to do 'Hulk,' my first instinct was to say no because I didn't think I had anything to say with the character, especially when they said, 'Please do what you did with 'Daredevil,' whatever that was.'
I broke into comics by working as a press reporter for the industry, for a trade press in comics, and reporting on events and reporting on books and so forth, and I got to know some of the editors at DC Comics in the mid-'80s.
I think comics are really - superhero comics are at their best and most primal when they're about joy and flying, and about escaping the gravity of the world. But, at the same time, that's not to say all stories should be happy.
What I've found over the years working on various projects is, you can have a clever book or clever tagline, but there has to be a story to go along with it that leads to something bigger. Something with a little more texture to it.
Jan. 26, 1979, was the most important day of my life. Because that's the day that I saw 'Superman: The Movie.' I came out of it knowing that no matter what the rest of my life was going to be like, it had to involve Superman somehow.
The best comics editors have the smallest egos. The worst ones feel like they have to justify their salaries by making changes just so they can leave their fingerprints. Every creative medium has those guys, and they're all loathsome.
I think of it this way: When you hear that people have downloaded your comic, appreciate that thousands are eager to hear what you have to say. The poetry club down the hall may not have the same problem. That's a good problem to have.
A superhero is someone who, at some point or in some way, inspires hope or is the enemy of cynicism. Even if you bog it down with political allegory, or even if you're doing celebrity allegory. You still need to take the cynical out of it.
All of us who grew up reading comics love the memory of sitting under an apple tree with a comic book in one hand and a peanut butter sandwich in the other; the tactile sensation of the paper on the skin and so forth is part of the experience.
I was the last guy I imagined anyone would ever associate with 'Daredevil,' but once I gave the character some thought, much like with the 'Fantastic Four,' I found my hooks and, I think, some angles on the series that have never been explored.
There's a reason Archie didn't go the way of Betty Boop or Davy Crockett or Woody Woodpecker, forgotten relics of a bygone era, and it's because when 'Archie' stories are at their best, anyone of any age can see a little bit of themselves in them.
Each time I think I've made a connection with someone... once they find out what I can do, whether it's hours or days later, everything changes. Invariably they freak. They get retroactively paranoid, wondering what else Clark Kent is hiding from them.
Captain America is an interesting character because it makes you ask those questions in yourself as a writer. What do we want as a nation, what do we mean as a nation, what is our role in the world as a nation? What are our strengths and weaknesses as a country?
By coincidence and not design, 'Everstar' is written and drawn by an all-female creative team, and it makes me smile to think that there may be young female readers out there, future writers and artists, who get to see that comics doesn't have to be a 'boys' club.'
I do believe that any sort of electromagnetic energy that can be measured beyond the moment of death is, by the definition of energy, eternal. But I cop to the fact that calling it a 'soul' and presuming it sustains our consciousness in any form is, to put it kindly, a leap.
When I was a kid, what captivated me about detective fiction were the puzzles more than the detectives or their enemies. And as I've gotten older, I see a lot of merit in setting your investigative sights higher than figuring out how someone stole Encyclopedia Brown's bicycle.
For me, it's infinitely more interesting to read or watch a character making decisions they think are right, but the audience knows differently, and seeing that disconnect. The only way characters can grow and learn is by making the wrong decisions and then learning from them.
Comics are expensive. Don’t make me resent the money I spend buying yours. Every single moment in your script must either move the story along or demonstrate something important about the characters — preferably both — and every panel that does neither is a sloppy waste of space.
We're brought up to believe in a fairytale-romance sort of way that true love is out there and true loves don't care about what you look like and stuff, just what's down inside. And that's probably true, but what's also true, sadly, is that true loves are very rare and very hard to find.
If you go back and look at the first issue of 'Indestructible Hulk,' if you have a sharp eye, you'll catch something that I totally forgot to put in there. In my horror, I only realized after the fact that I took totally for granted that everyone in the world knows what triggers the transformation.
When you're a kid, regardless of the age you grew up, everything is high opera. With hormones raging, you have to fight external and internal battles that you've never had to deal with before. Unlike Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, who have seen it all and been through it all, everything heightens the drama.
In Marvel Comics, the worst thing was always that your loved ones could be attacked, or you could be horribly beaten in a knock-down, drag-out fight, but in the Superman comics, you would be run out of town with people throwing rotten vegetables at you and waving a sign that said, 'Superman, Who Needs You?'