Zitat des Tages über Comics:
I do think there are some great female comics: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph. They're the whole ball of wax.
Comics have always helped people to read. A lot of people learned to read by reading the comics. And it's our livelihood, after all. If people don't know how to read, they're not reading our comics.
I'm not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.
I was being laughed at. I hated it, so I made an adjustment to control the situation. All comics learn that.
Ever since I'm done with Zim everyone thinks that I'm going to go back to comics. I've been flooded with emails asking me if I'm working on the new Johnny over and over again.
I have always loved horror very much. I used to write stories for DC's House of Mystery. It was one of my first jobs writing for comics, and I loved it.
I could go through a lot of my old emails from when I first started doing comics. Back then the lowest age of fans was like 15 or 16 up to people in their 20's and 30's.
I tend to only read comics written by friends or people I've known. And I'm not a great comic reader.
One of my comics is read by more people - around 70,000 - than will see my entire run at Manhattan Theater Club. That puts things in perspective.
We all accept the visual shorthand used throughout comics: if something's farther away, it'll be drawn with a thinner, simpler line, eventually leaving out most visual information and becoming a gesture, a skeletal representation of a thing.
It got to the point in the late 70s and early 80s that I was spending so much money buying golden age comics that I could only justify it if I got work in the media.
I didn't break into comics to write fairytales or crime comics.
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 digitally gave me the opportunity to do that.
I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Chums Annual.' At the same time, I read an enormous number of American comics because Shanghai was an American zone of influence.
In the history of comics and movies and music too, it's always when things are at their bottomed-out, either creatively or financially, there's more chance-taking going on.
I'm going to take over on the Techno Comics so I'm going to be dealing in the children's merchandising type department. But that's just setting it up and having somebody run it.
Because of the audience I get and the fact that these people aren't traditional comics buyers I don't think the comic industry looks at that and thinks that is a very respectable thing. I'm very used to it. I'm not the guy who wins awards and gets mentioned in magazines.
This is a profession for me, but I started off as a self-publisher working on my own schedule and my own stuff before moving on to graphic novels with First Second Books, where there was definitely a schedule, but it was very different from monthly comics.
What adults don't always understand is that to a kid, a comic book is like a movie. My Marvel comics took my imagination to other places - other galaxies.
Someone told me that there's a connection to Superman, that in an early edition of the Green Lantern comics, Tomar Re was the envoy to Krypton. That was fascinating to me.
But there's still an avenue for smaller comics and personal expression.
I think there are things that digital can't do as well as print thus far. Even an iPad is only 80% the size of a standard comics page, so the images are going to be smaller. You don't get your big, whopping two-page spreads.
When I first started making comics, I was living with a bunch of guys, old college friends. We had this deal. At the end of each day, they would ask me how far I'd gotten on my comic. And if I hadn't made my goals, they were supposed to make me feel really bad about myself. They happily obliged.
The thing that drives me crazy is when comics say 'I have low self-esteem.' No you don't. You're standing on stage asking people to pay. You don't play an instrument. You want people to pay to hear what's in your mind. You don't have low self-esteem. You might have other problems.
I actually have a peculiar feminism that does not involve the idea that women shouldn't be sexy. Female characters written in comics have always been pretty damned sexy, and used their sexuality. And I don't have any problem with that.
Certainly, my many years working in the comics industry, creating products that I do not own, has made me rather fierce on the subject of giving up rights.
I do know in the 1960s comics, Martian Manhunter took on the form of a black man - that could have been influenced by the political climate back then.
Comics were going down for the second time and here, all of a sudden, came this thing and for the next fifteen years, romance comics were about the top sellers in the field; they outsold everything.
Comics fans want new stuff that looks exactly like the old stuff. It is hard for the publishers, and even the audience, to change something.
I've tried to write from my own understanding of identity in all my comics, whether it's about superheroes or historical conflicts or monkey gods.
I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.
With comics you can put interesting and solid information in a format that's pretty palatable.
When I started writing comics, 'comics writer' was the most obscure job in the world! If I wanted to be a celebrity, I would have become a moody English screen actor.
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.'
Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.
I'm a huge Marvel Comics fan, and I'm a huge 'Wolverine' fan, I like the 'X-Men' comic book.