Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nixon is fascinating because he's our most alienated president. Everybody felt that they never knew who he was - that's palpable in the histories. His face is so cartoony that he's become this cartoon figure. I never really related to the romanticization of J.F.K., and I knew too much about Reagan to idealize him. Nixon falls in between.
I'm not sure about that role any longer. The role used to be to mix things up and I think to a great extent it still is, but the quality of the work of the political cartoon has been succeeded by the wisecrack, the gag cartoon, so that the cartoonist becomes more of the equivalent of the Jay Leno monologues, or David Letterman monologues.
The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: we are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims.
For a while, all the studios had their art-house divisions, but that went by the by pretty quickly. Now, they're really focusing on these huge blockbusters, spending a fortune on cartoon pictures and comic-strip movies and superhero movies, and they aren't making pictures like 'How Green Was My Valley,' which was an Oscar winner in its day.
I grew up in a bit of a vacuum. And as a kid, you see 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' and you're like, 'Oh, it's a cartoon.' There's mixed media. It's funny, and there's stop-motion. But as an adult, you figure it out, how the entire underpinnings of their comedy was poking fun at the rank and file of the British aristocracy and the monarchy.
With The Brood, it was cool because it had the music, it had the different look and at the time reality-based characters were really starting to take the forefront as opposed to the cartoon character stuff that you'd seen in the past. We were already into the Attitude era. It was kind of a gimmick, but it was a cool gimmick. It wasn't corny.
Guilty pleasure implies that it's something that I feel guilty for watching... people tell me I should feel guilty for watching because I'm too old to watch it, but I don't give a damn: I love everything on Cartoon Network from 'Adventure Time' to 'The Adventures of Gumball', 'Teen Titans'... all those shows that are for my kids, I like those!
Health messages are simply overwhelmed, in volume and in effectiveness, by junk-food ads that often deploy celebrities or cartoon characters to great effect. We may know that eating fruits and vegetables is good for us, but the preponderance of the signals we get - and especially the signals children get - push us in the direction of junk food.
In a story, for example, you'll start off with a character who is a little bit of a cartoon. That's not satisfying and you start revising. And as you revise you always are making it better by being specific and by observing more closely, which actually is really the same as saying you love your characters. The close observation equals love of them.
I don't really know what makes someone want to be a cartoonist, but part of it is trying to get in trouble. You're looking where the line is and seeing how much you can step over it, and I mean, I do that in my personal life, too. I try to anger and piss people off a little bit to try to see what I can get away with. I got in trouble with more than one cartoon.
It doesn't matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you're not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon.
I seem to thrive by destroying the last thing I did, in a kind of cartoon Nietzsche way. Emerson says in "Experience" something like "every ultimate fact soon becomes the next in a series." The self feels more real when you are destroying things you've made than when you are paying them homage. That's the good news about being self-destructive. The bad news, I feel I don't need to deliver.
We tried to make it more than just a cartoon. It was a cartoon, but we tried to make it more than it was to begin with. And I have 300,000 followers from Turkey, Romania, Poland, and places over there that love Life With Louie, where it was translated into their language. They love it. They are absolutely in love with it. And it just goes to show you: no matter where you go, it's always about family.
Cincinnati at that time was also beginning to realize it had major cartooning talent in Jim Borgman, at the city's other paper, and I didn't benefit from the comparison.His footsteps seemed like good ones to follow, so I cultivated an interest in politics, and Borgman helped me a lot in learning how to construct an editorial cartoon. Neither of us dreamed I'd end up in the same town on the opposite paper.
Nature only goes so far. Nurture, what you raised on and what you ingest as a youngster, it really affects you when you grow up in really subtle, long drawn-out ways. And to find that, to hear that thing again all those years later and to realize that was the source, it's like, "What else has me twisted?" So now I'm going back to robots and cartoons; I go back to all this to see what got me the way that I am.
When I'm online and I see a picture I want to draw of anybody or anything, a unique angle of them or just something that looks very drawable, I slide it to my desktop and put it in a folder. It just seems like every picture of Trump is a revelation. Any angle. I didn't know a person could look like that. His facial expressions - he really is a cartoon. He's like an instruction manual of how to caricature someone.
Amazingly, much of the best cartoon work was done early on in the medium's history. The early cartoonists, with no path before them, produced work of such sophistication, wit, and beauty that it increasingly seems to me that cartoon evolution is working backward. Comic strips are moving toward a primordial goo rather than away from it . . . Not only can comics be more than we're getting today. but the comics already have been more than we're getting today.
I'm creating my own oasis in my house. I've got a lot of calming, soothing things around my house. The way it's set up, it's supposed to just be a breath of fresh air. I can find solace in painting and writing. I honestly love what I do, so it's not too much for me. Creating is something I've always been able to do, whether it's making little cartoons or writing a full-length script. It's something I really, really enjoy. I'm trying to make the best of what I've been given.
There is a clear acknowledgement all over the world that we should not teach people to read and then to leave them without literature. For they would then relapse into a dreary and ultimately dangerous state of half-education, in which they would be easily satisfied by crude semi-pictorial approximations of the strip cartoon and by the abundant supply of degenerate literature which destroys, rather than promotes, a capacity to face the problems of the world with skill and courage
I did speak out about celebrities because I thought it was appalling. I thought that if the cartoon became popular, it was only going to last as long as the career of the people who are in it. They didn't make up timeless voices. They used their own. They brought nothing to the table, in other words. There was no alchemy. That's why a cartoon was so alluring, was that a human being went into a place and created this supernatural sound, or whatever sound it was supposed to be that was totally unlike their own, and did it in multiples.
I think a play can do almost anything, because it's also a static form, much more so than in a movie. In a movie you can move the scenery, you can do anything any way. A cartoon, happens in a limited amount of space and a limited amount of time, and you can only get so many words before the reader's gonna get impatient. All of these forms that I enjoy are in a sense a slight of hand, where you have to suggest much more than you really show. You have to, in a sense, seduce the reader and trick the reader or the audience into going with you.
At the time, liberals didn't understand that they had First Amendment rights. So, I was doing cartoons in this narrative cartoon form about subject surrounding that and as I was turned down by editor after editor at each publishing house, I began to notice on their desks this new newspaper called The Village Voice, which I then went and picked up and thought, well my god, these editors that were turning me down all, whom tell me how much they like my stuff, but they don't know how to market it because nobody knows who I am. If I got into this paper, they would know who I am.
I know that telling the story, there are certain events I want to skip, and certain events I want to hit. The time passing allows for - if you're really following people's lives, and this isn't a cartoon - someone gets pregnant, a child will be born, etc. You really don't want to be locked into "Every episode is a month later." The show is very intense to make. There's always going to be some downtime between seasons, and to me, it really helps to come back to the next season in the reality of that world, and have almost as much time passed in their lives as has passed in yours.
The fascinating thing about the studio was that there was no story department. They would put a little notice up on the bulletin board saying: 'The next Oswald will take place at the North Pole. Anybody having any gags, please turn them in before such a date.' If you turned in gags regularly, the way Tex Avery, Cal Howard, Jack Carr and two or three others of us did, you'd be called into the gag meeting. The group would go into Walt's office and talk about whatever the subject of the cartoon was. Walt would put it into some kind of form and that was the story--no scripts, no storyboards.
