Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I spent age 6-12 basically thinking about 'Back to the Future' all the time, so I think it's probably had a pretty huge influence on me and the way I think and write.
There may be this hidden, hate-filled community of online cartoonists, but if there are, I haven't found it yet. We're all generally pretty nice people, it turns out!
But giving up's easy. You know what's hard? To believe in your own worth, to know you've got something special in you even if nobody else can see it. Even when you can't.
Don't worry, it's very clear that the painting was done by a human, most likely a human with one eye removed and a feverent if incorrect understanding of design and anatomy.
'Adventure Time' tells stories where anything can happen, but what happens is. It stars Finn, a boy who fights evil, and Jake, a dog with stretchy powers. Both of them can talk.
In earlier comics, my only priority was telling a joke in the last panel, but now I try to make every panel as interesting as possible, and that normally means at least a li'l joke there.
The funny thing with Ophelia is that I remembered her being this really cool, awesome female character when I read 'Hamlet' in high school, and when I went back and read it, no, she's not.
I think with most things online, if you treat your audience like friends instead of like Impressions and Clickthrough Percentages and Returns On Investment, then you're off to a great start.
For me personally, I get to be a cartoonist, because my comic would never survive in print. Maybe one in 100 people would like it, but online, I can gather that one percent all in one place.
The challenge is to stay true to the characters while also having them be entertaining every day, because it turns out that just watching someone be true to themselves isn't that rad to watch.
ComicsAlliance asked if I wanted to do some holiday comics using a new layout and I said ‘HELLO, NEVER IN MY NEAR-DECADE OF MAKING COMICS HAVE I EVER DONE THIS, so actually I’m really glad you asked!’
Writing 'Jughead' in general is a pleasure because - and I think a lot of very tall guys can agree with me on this - there was a time in my teenage years where I just ate all the time and never got full.
I speculate that the genesis of the chicken-joke lies in some situation such as the one illustrated above, but over time the original context of the joke was lost, which left the chicken sadly decontextualized.
I've never written a novel before, and part of the reason I haven't is I was worried about getting 50,000 words into a book and realizing I'd made a mistake on word three that would mean throwing everything out.
I believe that a good comic script can succeed despite being drawn badly, but that a bad script can't be saved by good art. Of course, great writing and great illustration makes for a great comic 100 percent of the time.
The idea of taking command of your life and doing something that you're not sure if you can do and you're not really sure if you should do it, I think is pretty timeless. We all face those doubts often, if not constantly.
As a kid, I loved the idea of alternate possibilities, roads not taken, that sort of thing - and I think seeing the 'Adventure Time' universe rendered by the artists in those stories will scratch that same itch really well.
The first mp3 I downloaded, which I guess was illegal, was a symphonic rendering of the Super Mario Brothers 1-1 theme song. It was great. I was like, 'This is blowing MIDI files out of the water. This is the future, right here.'
There's a difference between children's literature and all-ages literature. One is written expressly for children. The other is written for everyone, including children. And the difference usually manifests in not talking down to kids.
What I thought would be fun would be Squirrel Girl being this computer science student, working in STEM, because you don't see a lot of characters there, never mind female characters. Also, I studied computer science, so it's not too hard to write.
A huge potential audience, great interaction with your readers, the ability to see what people like and what they don't, the ability to see how people respond to what you're doing in real-time - there's just tons of great stuff that you get by being online.
As all C.S. students know, first year is super easy, but second year is when things get harder. At least that's how it was in my experience. And I didn't have to save the planet between classes either. Instead, I went home and studied quietly. I was a party animal.
It's a lot harder for an author that's unpublished to say, 'Hey, here's a new book.' There's nothing of theirs to read, so you don't know what it's going to be like. Kickstarter is great, but you also have to put your work out there whenever you can so you can build a reputation.
I've always found it funny when people call 'Romeo and Juliet' 'the greatest love story ever told' because - man - it does not work out well for those kids, you know? I'd like to think the greatest love story ever told would at least let them be together for more than a few hours.
Squirrel Girl is basically a Silver Age character in the modern age, and that makes her a fish out of water in a lot of ways. She likes being a superhero. She likes fighting crime. She doesn't sit around brooding in the darkness of her Squirrel Hole trying to figure out new ways to make crime pay.
I used to worry that I had a finite supply of ideas, that I should hold on to each of them in case it was the last. But then I talked to other cartoonists, and I realized ideas are cheap; you can have a million ideas. The tricky part is the follow-through: making good ones work, making the best out of the raw material!
My first book, 'To Be or Not To Be,' took 'Hamlet' and converted it to the choose-your-own-path format. It was a great fit for a book where you control what happens - a book as game - because the plot of 'Hamlet' is very game-like: get a mission from a ghost to kill the final boss, kill the final boss, and game over. You win.
I think the best villains are ones that you can look at and say, 'Yeah, he's obviously going about this the wrong way or going too far or whatever, but I can see where he's coming from.' Magneto's a great example of that, and the reason he and Charles Xavier can have such great conversations is that they can both make some good points.
The secret to writing sound effects is having a room you can be alone in, trying to make the sounds yourself, and seeing what comes out. It's similar to if you're writing a character talking with their mouth full: the only way I know to transcribe that is to stuff my fist in my mouth and write down what sounds I make when I try to talk.