Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.
As a fanboy, I was raised on the Marvel Universe, so I was very familiar with the 'Deadpool' world. On the other side, the 'X-Men' comics were one of my top five comics, so to be one of them, especially Colossus, is an incredible thing after years of creatively visualizing him since I was a kid.
There is a very diverse range of superheroes, especially with the Firestorm character. In the comics, there is a black Firestorm. But we still don't see that many black superheroes. So what The CW is doing and what DC Comics is doing with this whole universe with diversity is absolutely amazing.
I had some terrible times - comparatively speaking. I saddled myself with a load of debt, I wasn't liked by a lot of my fellow comics and I used to blame other people for me not getting a break. But now I realise I just wasn't very good. And as soon as I became good, things took off pretty quickly.
I like all of the early relationship strips that were collected in 'Love Is Hell,' where I pretended to be an expert in relationships and did comics like 'The Nine Types of Boyfriends,' 'Sixteen Ways to End a Relationship,' 'Twenty-Four Things Not to Say in Bed,' and other arbitrarily numbered lists.
'All Def' is unlike any other comedy show or set because 'All Def' goes back to the essence of how urban comedy started. We give it a 'stoop appeal.' A stoop appeal is important for us because it's where pretty much all black comics started doing their standup: cracking jokes on the stoop, in the hood.
I was just finishing high school and entering college in 1988, when the Creator's Bill of Rights was drafted, and had already set my sights on building a career as a writer of comics. Discovering the Creator's Bill of Rights - in an issue of 'The Comics Journal,' if I'm not mistaken - I accepted it as gospel.
Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.
I'm not a confrontational person or comedian. I think we can explore more things if one of us is not fighting with the other. I take it easy. But I do like comedians who are very different from myself: I love dry comics with deadpan one-liners. I look on and think, 'That's amazing; why didn't I think of that?'
When I started on the London circuit in 1989, nationwide there were about 150 to 200 people that were what you could call alternative comedians - that weren't club comics. Now, last year when the Laughing Horse chain of clubs held a new acts competition, a thousand people entered. So, there are 800 people more.
I've seen many female comics that a lot of people haven't heard of who are so funny, and I saw them come up, and they were working so hard, and then all of a sudden they had a baby, and they just got tied up in motherhood, and eventually, they kind of just stopped doing stand-up, and I thought it was such a shame.
Growing up, I didn't really read a lot of comics; we didn't really have the money to get them. But I grew up a universal fan of fantasy and sci-fi and watching a lot of TV. There's always this question of 'Are you a fan of sci-fi or fantasy?' But can't you be a fan of both? We love everything fantasy, my wife and I.
Because I was in the business of translating the 'X-Men' from the very successful comics, and taking the most popular book of the 20th century in 'The Lord of the Rings,' and making it into three movies, I hope people realize I wouldn't get involved in anything I didn't think was really going to be worth their while.
When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn't have to follow 'Watchmen' and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual.
My first stand-up experience, like most comics, was horrible. I got booed offstage. I thought I was funnier than I was. But the walk from the back of the room to the stage was the most excited I'd ever been about anything in my life other than kissing a girl. That's how I knew I had to get back onstage and do it again.
Comics have a problem, and that is continuity - the obsession with placing the characters in an existing world, where every event is marked in canon. You're supposed to believe that these weepy star boys of now are the same gung-ho super teens fighting space monsters in the '60s, and they've only aged perhaps five years.
My sense of politics and justice was deeply shaped in adolescence by my involvement with the underground punk - rock scene, and though lots of social and political issues had come forth in my comics, it wasn't until my late 20s that I felt properly equipped to address certain issues of race, power, and violence in my work.
I think when you look at the diversity of the readership, all the different people who love comics, I want comics to reflect the real world, and I think Marvel does a good job of trying to do that, but I don't think there's ever an end point when it comes to creating diversity and creating stories that people can relate to.
I was always a fan of the old-style comics. I loved vaudeville. I loved Milton Berle, Dick Shawn, Phyllis Diller, Don Rickles, Charlie Callas, all those guys. Hilarious. I love the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movies, and Abbott & Costello. My television influences were 'Monty Python's Flying Circus,' 'Benny Hill,' and 'Hee Haw.'
In comics the reader is in complete control of the experience. They can read it at their own pace, and if there's a piece of dialogue that seems to echo something a few pages back, they can flip back and check it out, whereas the audience for a film is being dragged through the experience at the speed of 24 frames per second.
The comics I read as a kid were all about guys in tights. But here was a guy who wore a fedora. He fought crime like they did in Marvel and DC, but he did it in the real world. I had just turned 12 when I met the Spirit and it was a strange coincidence. At the same time I discovered girls I fell out of love with guys in tights.
I started once a week in North Carolina at a pub called Charlie Goodnight and met a lot of comics there. Then I moved to L.A., and if you're not known, it's hard to get stage time. So you start out doing what they call 'bringers' - you have to bring five people if you wanna get on stage. It was a lot of hustle, a learning curve.
I love festivals because they seem like more of an artsy, supportive attitude - which benefits a more theatrical performer sometimes with having theater and other non-club venues, as well as the audience being filled with other artists. It's nice to be with other comics, as usually at other road gigs, I'm solo for the most part.
Performing comedy in San Francisco to begin with is pretty wild. You've got to - you've got the human game preserve to play off of. And it's a lot of great characters everywhere. You work off that, and then you play the rooms, and eventually you get to a point where you're playing a club that is a comedy club, with other comics.
For other comics, it's about full-spectrum dominance, being on panel shows and having one-liners and being a good chat show guest and having a good seven minutes you can do on 'Live At The Apollo.' But I really think about these subsequent finished pieces, you know? And they don't always chop up well into one-liners and routines.
The great thing about working in comics is that visually, you're the sole voice. You have to figure out the staging, the lighting, the composition, the character emotions, the action. You get a script, but you're trying to work it out in individual panels. It's a terrific exercise in creative thinking and creative problem-solving.
When I first started writing comics, in the way-back days, Typhoid Mary was my explosive response to women characters in comics - I made her an innocent virginal type, a clever, dark, liberated woman, and as Bloody Mary, a feminist bent of punishing men - all in one character. She was an instinctual rather than a calculated creation.
I was one of those goofy kids whose year narrowed down to focus on Christmas from about September on. I guess I was like Ralphie in 'A Christmas Story,' in that I would get swept up into the anticipation of the holiday, watching the lights go up, hearing the songs in the stores, getting special Christmas issues of comics and all that.
I loved the idea that I had an alter-ego but that my true identity was very well known and very much on the surface. I was the only one who didn't know who Stardust really was. So it was very much tied to comics - everything I've done. I did a whole run where I'd wear a face mask when I was on SmackDown, and that was based on Dr. Doom.
I don't know who made the first Aquaman joke. I'm sure it was comics readers; maybe we all did. But it's the idea that the perpetuated story of Aquaman is that he only has powers in water, and he talks to fish. I think it's the idea of him in the middle of a city just doesn't make a lot of sense to people. It's just the character itself.
I'd quite like to write a book about comics, actually. But trying to write about comics as literature, which I don't think anyone's really done before. Sometimes they're more like fan books, and I'd quite like to write one about the Marvel universe over the last 50 years. It's an unprecedented achievement to create that length of continuity.
When I was in the middle of the 'Scott Pilgrim' series, and it was slowly becoming more popular, though still not financially solvent, I had this real bratty instinct to turn around and do something super arty and dark. I felt dismissed by comics culture, stuck in between the artcomix world and the nerdcomix world, and I was cranky about it.
With comics, you don't have to worry so much about budgetary constraints. In film and television, however fanciful you want to be, someone can come up to you and go, 'Okay, this is going to cost X amount of dollars, and we only have so many days to film this.' With graphic novels, you can have that alien invasion you've always wanted to see.
Luckily for me, my father had impeccable taste. No contemporary collector was he. His treasure trove of comics included gems such as 'Little Lulu,' 'Frontline Combat' and 'Classics Illustrated.' But the works that stood head and shoulders above the rest were Carl Barks's 'Donald Duck' and 'Uncle Scrooge' comics from the 1940s through the 1960s.
