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 t...
I think readers are always patient. Look at the 'Harry Potter' series. Some have given up on this generation of kids as game and TV addicts, but lots of people spend lots of time patiently reading through hundreds of pages of dense prose. I think rea...
Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts - a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff - but we certainly don't think of them adding up over ...
George Carlin is kind of my template now because George Carlin before was straight laced regular comic and he had short hair, a tie, suit, nightclub guy. Then he said screw it, let his hair grow, just started telling what he thought was the truth. So...
[a general greets Medal of Honor winner Staff Sgt. Raymond Shaw on his return to the U.S] General: Congratulations, son. How do you feel? Raymond Shaw: Like Captain Idiot in Astounding Science comics.
Adrian Veidt: I'm not a comic book villain. Do you seriously think I would explain my master stroke to you if there were even the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome? I triggered it 35 minutes ago.
At some point, all comics have to go out and be retail salesmen doing door-to-door. And this idea of somebody who totally knows their craft having to get up for free in front of a crowd to work out some stuff they're thinking in their head, still, af...
I created 'Captain Underpants' when I was in the second grade. I was constantly getting in trouble for being the class clown, so my teacher sent me out into the hallway to punish me. It was there in the hall that I began drawing 'Captain Underpants'....
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...
Danielle: I think I'm going to write my own comic. Harvey Pekar: Oh yeah? What about? Danielle: I'm not sure yet, but not about you. I think you have enough already.
Evolutionary biology is imperialistic, overtaking entire fields of endeavor simply by attaching the prefix bio – or neuro -- to their names: bioethics, no comics, even, God help us, neurotheology. Its logic is deployed against helpless laymen as a ...
The drawing and the crafting of the story are fun, but it's the overall meaning that matters to me. It might escape some people who just want to read a comic, and that's fine. The overall meaning is what matters.
The difference between 'Watchmen' and a normal comic book is this: With 'Batman's Gotham City,' you are transported to another world where that superhero makes sense; 'Watchmen' comes at it in a different way, it almost superimposes its heroes on you...
And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to a soccer game.
Though most tourists accepted the occasional comic misadventure, it was important to them that overall their vacation should be pleasant. When you spend money on a holiday you are essentially purchasing happiness: if you don't enjoy yourself you will...
I'm not good at narrative; I'm really a gag writer, and that comes from being in the newspaper comic strip world for a while in college. What I do is I just write tons of jokes, then I sort them out in terms of quality and then pick the best of the j...
I read the Bible when I was 12 while studying for my bar mitzvah. I was also reading a lot of Dilbert comics at the time, and I guess the two kind of got fused in my mind. I've always imagined God as an irrational, distractible boss. It's my best exp...
I sneaked out to his house a couple times in the middle of the night to watch over him while he slept, just in case, I dont know, his comic book collection decided to spontaneously combust. This was dumb and admittedly creepy in an Edward Cullen kind...
Wouldn't want to write the X-Men, and I suppose the X-Men is the ultimate Marvel comic, and I really wouldn't want to go anywhere near it at all, although on the other had I wouldn't mind having a crack at something like the Punisher.
And what better way to reinvent the form than to toss virtually 99% of everything that's been done with it and start with a brand-new canvas, reinvent it from the ground up? Digital comics gave me the opportunity to do that, and producing things digi...
There is a scene in one comic from the '60s-'70s where Batman finds a film, a newsreel film, of his father. This newsreel film is from the '50s, and his father has come to this costume ball in a Zorro costume, which strangely enough looks a lot like ...