Zitat des Tages von Jeff Lemire:
Everyone finds my work super sad. I never do. I always find it uplifting in a weird way.
For some reason, I have always had a really good ability to write children in a way that's realistic but not annoying. The key to that is underwriting them: peel back the dialogue and keep it simple.
If you read the whole Vertigo 'Animal Man' series of 89 issues or whatever, each writer has a completely different take on his origin. If you try to put them all together, they contradict one another. I had to pick and choose to make up a new origin that makes sense to new readers.
My indie work is mostly reality-based, focused on real life and characters.
The cool thing about 'Sweet Tooth' is that you can bring influences from the underground and alternative people that I read and also bring in some genre influences, too, from movies and comics. And kind of mash it all up. It's a fun project.
I am sort of pessimistic in that way where I often think the worst of people.
I never thought I would work in mainstream superhero comics or Valiant or Marvel. I just set out to make the kinds of stories I wanted to make, which at the beginning was small personal stuff like 'Essex County.'
When I write Superboy and other DC characters, it's about boiling them down to core concepts.
When I'm doing the Justice League stuff, my point of view is always coming through Buddy. And he's a dad, and there's stuff about his life that I relate to with my life, and I can also take the abilities of animals, which a lot of people don't know about me.
I would love to learn archery. Unfortunately I'm too busy writing and drawing ten thousand comics a month. Maybe one day!
Sometimes, if you have a lot of history with a character and a lot of affection, it's hard for you to do anything with that character. Like with Swamp Thing, for instance, I revere the Alan Moore run so much that it would be hard for me to do my own Swamp Thing. I care too much about the way it was done before.
I feel like there are comic book artists who are comic book artists, and then there's comic book artists who are cartoonists.
When I approached 'Animal Man,' I approached it as if it wasn't a reboot, as if the Grant Morrison and Jamie Delano stuff happened. I mean, as much as I could make it all make sense, it still all happened.
When I first seriously decided to become a cartoonist would have been '99/2000, right before 9/11. I've been writing and illustrating stories in the world post-9/11 since then, watching the world change around me.
I enjoyed my time at DC. Dan Didio, Geoff Johns and Jim Lee were great to me, and I'm very grateful for the opportunities they gave me. Having said that, I think it's important to try new things and work with new people to keep myself fresh.
The thing about Canada is that it's a very large country, and the population's very spread out among different regions. Each region in the country really has its own personality and its own culture, you know? From West Coast to East Coast - wherever you go, it's almost like it's its own country.
I can handle a lot of work. I've always been able to. I'm a very focused individual. I come to my studio at about 7:30 in the morning and exit almost 5:00 P.M. In that time, those eight or nine hours, it's kind of laser focus on whatever I'm working on. There aren't really any distractions or anything.
'Plutona' is the story of five kids who find the body of the world's greatest superhero in the woods after school one day. It's about how this discovery, and the decisions they make, affect them as a group and individually.
There's been Hollywood interest in a lot of the stuff that I've done, but Descender's felt different right from the start for whatever reason. I don't know if that's because a lot of my other stuff's a little more idiosyncratic, and 'Descender' has a bit more of a high concept to it.
One of my favorite things about the DC Universe, growing up as a reader, was just how big it was and just how many characters and superheroes there were. And how many odd characters there were.
When I do my best work, the stories tend to be pretty emotionally-charged.
When you're a kid, you're not as corrupted by the world at large. You're not corrupted by prejudices. You're much more open-minded. Much more interested in the world around you. 'Sweet Tooth' is about the world returning to that kind of place.
I think America's obsession with guns and with violence in media and society is a horrible sickness.
I think being an archer is much more integral to Green Arrow and his mythos than it is to Hawkeye.
I don't enjoy putting my characters through hell unless there's a reason. I don't use violence or anything just for shock value. They're always a means to an end.
I started off doing indie comics that I wrote and drew myself. I was doing those for ten years before I started to work for DC. The first book that I wrote for DC was for another artist. I did some backups in 'Adventure Comics' years ago starring The Atom. That's the first time that I ever wrote for another artist.
I can't really write anything without knowing the ending. I don't know how people do that. Even with my superhero stuff, I have to know at least where I want to take the characters and what the ending of my story with them will be. I just can't structure stories or character arcs and stuff without knowing the endpoint.
Why not take a science fiction comic and put the characters in a small town to gain their particular perspective? A lot of that comes from me growing up in a small town on a farm, so that's what I know and what I'm comfortable with. My drawing style is also very sparse and minimalist, so a rural setting complements that.
I've found I sometimes have the best success working on characters I didn't really connect to right away.
You run the risk, whenever you build your story around a central mystery, of either letting it go too long, or revealing it too soon and then taking the wind out of the sails of the narrative.
Oliver Queen/Green Arrow is a character whose core is about legacy and responsibility. And that all comes from his father and the responsibilities of living up to his legacy.
I grew up in a pretty religious house. My family was Roman Catholic, and I couldn't wait to get away from that. But that doesn't mean I'm not a spiritual person.
