Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Write. Write every day. Write honestly. Write something that doesn’t exist, and you wish did. Read. Learn. Study. Watch people. Listen to what they say, listen to how they say it and listen to what they do not say. Surprise yourself. Scare yourself.
Comics publishers are used to looking in a very, very narrow focused prism. It's like when I started writing 'X-Men.' Our 'meat and potatoes' money was made of newsstand sales, while anything that came through the Direct Market was considered gravy.
Why did you make it so hard for me? I'd rather empty the ocean with a sieve. I do it for you. Or count the grains of sand on every beach. All for you. There are so many people, so many countries. But I have time. All the time in the world. Eternity.
I think the problem with the term graphic novel is it sounds pompous, it sounds pretentious, whereas on the continent, they call it an album, which to me sounds, it's got more much of a connotation of a kind of a music single and an album collection.
Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.
You have a valid complaint, and I do recognize it ... but you are reading into things a little bit. Just the same, I will do my best to make horrible things happen to a bunch of white people before something else so graphic hits a minority character.
The DC Universe has the best villains in fiction, right? I don't think there's any group of villains collectively or anywhere else that come close to DC's. Joker, Cat Woman, Lex Luthor, are all staples. A lot of the comic book icons are fiction icons.
'Forever Evil' is my love letter to DC super villains. It's my chance to take all of the villains I've worked with and all the ones I've never worked with and put them into one gigantic, epic story that will bring together the bads of the DC Universe.
I like Silver Surfer because he's the most philosophical, always philosophizing about the human race and the human condition and why people are the way they are, why they don't appreciate this wonderful planet they live on... he has a nice moral tone.
The only damn thing I ever learned in all my years in art school was a piece is never done, it is just finished. You have to trust your inner voice, your instincts, when they tell you pencils down. And you roll up your sleeves and you start over again.
My resonance to Magneto and Xavier was borne more out of the Holocaust. It was coming face to face with evil, and how do you respond to it? In Magneto's case it was violence begets violence. In Xavier's it was the constant attempt to find a better way.
And Supernatural, in fact, going there wasit felt like a place where I had to actually, um, learn to be kind of manly. I felt like I had to kind of change my, like, way of speaking for a little bit, just to kind of fit in, oddly enough. Which was weird.
The challenge is, in terms of a canon like 'X-Men,' it's more like 'Harry Potter' and Hogwarts, or 'Game of Thrones.' It needs time and space to evolve and to bring the reader or viewer in and give them a result that's worth the investment of that time.
I'm at a stage in my career where I don't expect or get too much editorial input into what I'm doing. I have a proven track record of success, so my editors are willing to cut me some slack even when a particular approach is not to their personal taste.
The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know? I don't really think it matters. It's the same as, like, a decapitation. It's just a horrible act to show that somebody's a bad guy.
Everybody is excited about their projects and I'm excited too. It's not like working. It's like playing with your friends. When I was a kid, I'd say to my mother, "Can I go out and play with the kids now?" Now I'm out playing with the kids all day long.
Creative life should be more than preaching to the converted, more than going for a core audience of 100,000 people. It should be taking risks, challenging the readership and having enough faith in one's own talent and craft to take readers on that ride.
If Shakespeare and Michelangelo were alive today, and if they decided to collaborate on a comic, Shakespeare would write the script and Michelangelo would draw it. How could anybody say that this wouldn't be as worthwhile an artform as anything on earth?
For me that's the magic of the printed page - we don't have to pay attention to the passage of time and focus in on the realities of these characters at a specific age or at a specific time in their lives, and we can play with that to our hearts' content.
My father worked in Chrysler's drafting department and used to bring home tracing paper, No. 2 pencils, and masking tape from the office. With these, I used to trace off drawings from the 'Superman' and 'Batman' comics and put them up on my bedroom walls.
All I thought about when I wrote my stories was, "I hope that these comic books would sell so I can keep my job and continue to pay the rent." Never in a million years could I have imagined that it would turn into what it has evolved into nowadays. Never.
I had been writing comic books for years and I was doing them to please a publisher, who felt that comics are only read by very young children or stupid adults. And therefore, we have to keep the stories very simplistic... And those were all things I hated.
I always felt the 'X-Men,' in a subtle way, often touched upon the subject of racism and inequality, and I believe that subject has come up in other titles, too. But we would never pound hard on the subject, which must be handled with care and intelligence.
The wonder, especially about the 'New Mutants' is, they're all kids. They're all growing. They're changing, literally, from page to page in terms of character and approach, past, present, and future. As a writer, that's the most delicious thing to play with.
I really explored self-awareness and emotions through 'Green Lantern.' It might sound goofy, but I do believe that emotions have power. We're all driven by something, and most of that is emotional reaction. For me, it was about recognizing my self-awareness.
No matter how good a story is, if you're at a newsstand and you see a lot of comic books, you don't know how good the story is unless you read it. But you can spot the artwork instantly, and you know whether you like the artwork, whether it grabs you or not.
It's always interesting to see what the real enthusiasts think, but they're rarely representative of the tastes of the wider audience, so I tend to write for myself, for an imagined smart 14-year-old, and for a couple of friends who are still big comics fans.
If you look back on my career with Marvel, you will see that I don't really return to the House of Ideas to do Captain Marvel, Adam Warlock, and Silver Surfer stories. I always come back to the fold to tell further adventures of everyone's favorite Mad Titan.
My wife and I have this discussion all the time. Her primal influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Mine are Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit and T.H. White. So, we have certain structural differences in form and content right off the bat!
I actually tried replying to what I thought were some unfair comments on the Internet once or twice, and I never heard back. What seems to happen with some people is they're very much interested in voicing their own opinions, but not in having them challenged.
I think it's just the challenge. It's not that all my life I've wanted to do characters [in Marvel] , because I never particularly thought about it, but the challenge of saying, "How could they be done differently that may be more absorbing or more effective?"
If one were to go back to the '50s, the most popular TV genre on the air in the United States were Westerns. You could go turn on ABC or CBS on any night and you'd almost have three full hours of everything from 'Bonanza' to 'Rawhide' to 'Wanted Dead or Alive.'
Performing magic has a lot to do with the arrangement of apparent coincidences and providing pathways along which desires can travel, or, to put it in more basic terms, there's little point in sigilizing for a lottery win if you don't also buy a lottery ticket.
You're either on team Republican or team Democrat, and it's the idea that one of these sides has a perfect record of being correct and is worth supporting on 100% of the causes. I find that kind of thinking extremely dangerous and very intellectually dishonest.
Fear is one of the elements of nonlethal weaponry. You're going to get hurt, and you don't want to get hurt. Pepper spray hurts. You don't want to be sprayed. That's why it's a useful deterrent as a nonlethal weapon - I'm not advocating spraying people randomly.
It's hard not to be enthusiastic when you like what you're doing and I love what I do. I love writing stories, I love coming up with ideas for new projects and I love the people I work with, because I work with great writers and artists and directors and actors.
I love all the voiceovers I do. I can't remember them all, but I seem to do them all of the time. And there's nothing easier because you just stand and read the script, and you don't have to act the way actors do. You don't have to be made up and put costumes on.
The one thing we can all relate to is family, and family has its traumas sometimes. Sometimes things don't go well for people. Sometimes things are tough. So everybody kind of knows someone who's been in this situation before, and I think that's what makes it work.
Because I've spent most of my life with such a beautiful, talented, challenging female, I feel I've gained - and am still gaining - a great deal of knowledge about the feminine mystique and about personal relationships - knowledge which is so important to a writer.
Artists forget than the first purpose of a comic character is to convey emotion. Everything else, like realism, or other kinds of virtuosity, is an optional extra. If you sacrifice expression for the sake of other concerns, you're putting the cart before the horse.
I'd like to have had a bigger piece of Thanos than I do, but when the first 'Avengers' movie came out, Marvel and I - we renegotiated some things, so I get a taste out of this thing. I'm not becoming the next Bill Gates, but I'm getting a little something out of it.
In my mind jealousy would come with seeing people do something that makes it all look extremely easy when it's not, like artists who can draw better than I can. In college, I was different. I was so hungry that anyone else who was published - I couldn't deal with it.
The cool thing about comic books and prose is that if a reader gets confused on page 8, they can backtrack. With films, you sit down in a seat and once the projector starts going you're stuck for the next two hours. There are no do-overs, rewinding or starting again.
If you're going to create a character, the tools you use to make that character 'real' are the lives you see around you. The people you listen to on the street. The emotions you see on faces and bodies while you're sitting... in a Starbucks, watching the world go by.
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.
There are still plenty of people who want to burn me at the stake for my Wonder Woman run. And I can't really blame them, you know? That was my take on the character, and when people are invested in the characters, they see them very clearly and in the way they like.
I just think adding superheroes to something instantly makes it more interesting. I have a friend who says every movie should either be a Spider-Man movie, or at least have Spider-Man in it. I thought it was such a brilliant quote. It kind of is true, in a weird way.
If you have a character that seems to be all perfect, it's hard to relate to him because when you read a story you really want to empathize with the character that you are reading about. And it's hard to empathize with someone who is flawless and who has no problems.
I do like to keep abreast of what the hardcore vocal members of the comics-reading audience are talking about on Internet message boards, but there are so few of them, as a percentage of the buying audience, that I can't allow their opinions to dictate story direction.
I think any comic book - or really, any book that you can read - in a sense is an educational tool in that it helps literacy. The more you read, the better you get at it. It almost doesn't matter what you read, the important thing is for young people to become readers.