Marvel Comics has always been a place where I felt at home. It has been a very important part of my life and has always been a wellspring of creative and relevant ideas.
You go, well you can't joke about race. Well if you're from a different race and that's your experience of the world and you want to talk about that, then fine. Or you can't talk about disability, but disabled comics can talk about that.
When I was nine years old I use to copy - not trace - the covers of the Donald Duck comics. Many years later I became a close friend of Jack Hannah, the director of the Donald Duck film shorts.
Reading books might itself be a bit weird, but obviously okay, since books were part of school, and doing well in school was clearly a good thing. But comics were more like candy, just flashy wrappers without any nourishment. Cheap thrills.
I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.
I don't think the potential for comics in nonfiction has been exploited nearly as much as it could be.
I have 15,000 comics in a warehouse, all bagged individually.
The type of cartooning that I think is generally referred to as 'alternative' or 'underground' is usually - the distinction is usually in terms of whether it's made by one person, the entire thing is done by one hand or more of a production line process, which is how the comics that we grew up reading were made.
We relate comics to the main super-heroes, but it's a great medium through which all sorts of stories are told.
I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
What other people are adapting from the comics medium, I watch with as much interest as I do any other movies. Because I'm a fan, and I want to see what other people are doing in the world.
So much of comics are dictated by characters talking to one another - or in focused spaces where 'the camera' has to stay in pretty close on what's going on.
I'd begun reading Crumb shortly before that, and other underground stuff, so that was an influence to some degree. Of course the Marvel and DC comics, they had been my main interests in my teenage years.
I ended up reading comics and just started drawing at a very young age. By high school, I was putting together longer stories. In college, I started doing strips for the newspaper and doing mini-comics. It sort of grew in scope and scale over time.
Motion comics are just cheap animation. Very cheap animation. And I like animation almost as much as I like comics, but I'm not rushing to pay out for a cheap hybrid of the two.
A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.
I guess my journey with comics began with stuff like Spider-Man and Batman. I started off with mainstream superhero stuff, which I've never abandoned.
I'm a fan of the sensibility of comics, and I love the escapism of them and the defining of good and evil. They're just so creative, too.
We want the reading experience of digital comics to be as simple as tapping a tablet or an arrow key or mouse button to move forward or back.
I kind of hate over-explanation in comics.
I love meeting fans. The people who are fans of my books are really smart and dedicated, because some independent comics are hard to get. I will drive all the way to Pittsburgh or Detroit to put it in their hands.
Bad taste is not illegal. I always got my first laughs as a kid by saying inappropriate things. That's always how we're going to get our laughs as comics.
What made me want to go into doing comics was I was working as a laborer with my father, a gardener.
But with comics you're reading and assimilating an image simultaneously, instead of just reading or watching the tube.
There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They're like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages.
At the Sahara, the seats are banked and most of the audience is looking down at the stage. Everybody in the business knows: Up for singers, down for comics. The people want to idealize a singer. They want to feel superior to a comic. You're trying to make them laugh. They can't laugh at someone they're looking up to.
I've done illustration on the side. But other than that, comics have been my main things.
All through my comics career, I was always trying to reinvent the form.
I put my comics that are really valuable into regular mylar because I like to look at them. Once they're in those clam shell boxes, they're impossible to open up.
When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.
I remember the dark days when, thanks to 1966's 'Batman' with Adam West, comics were considered the ugly stepchild of popular culture.
A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things; you'd say, 'That's what a child would do.'
The most unrealistic thing I've ever read in comics is when some group of characters calls themselves the Brotherhood of Evil or the Masters of Evil. I don't believe any character believes their goals to be truly evil.
Comics, at least in periodical form, exist almost entirely free of any pretense; the critical world of art hardly touches them, and they're 100% personal.
I love comic book movies, and Marvel Comics obviously are the best.
Gleason was a rough guy. Like all of these comics, I have never known one who is a sweetheart all the way through.
