Write comic books if you love comic books so much that you want to write them. Don't write them like movies. Comics can do a lot of things that movies can't do, and vice versa.
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.
I never really read comics. I bought them, and I would draw them.
The '80s convergence of comics' new adult sensibility with the movies' advancing technology was bound to catch the attention of even slow-on-the-uptake Hollywood, and this particularly was true when 'Watchmen' and 'The Dark Knight Returns' became phenomena.
As a kid, I was a big comic fan and I liked foreign comics as well.
I appreciate the audience for checking us as comics.
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.
It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.
My interests were in fantasy more than comics growing up.
I had never come across the 'X-Men' comics till I was asked to play Magneto, so I just jumped into that job.
I read the comics long before I was ever involved with the films.
So many comics have such low self-esteem.
A lot of those comics can't hold down relationships and they've got no other life apart from performing. They sleep in their Jags and a lot of them can't even talk. All they can do is tell gags.
When people say 'What are underground comics?' I think the best way you can define them is just the absolute freedom involved... we didn't have anyone standing over us.
I think it's our job as writers for Marvel Comics to continue to create those type of stories that can be mined instead of just trying to give readers exactly what they see on film.
I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics.
I think all comics borrow from each other. Only a few have an original voice, and I wasn't one of them. In the end, I couldn't figure out who to steal from, so I stopped doing it.
I never was really into comics as a child, and I think if you miss the boat when you're a kid, you don't necessarily pick up on it when you're an adult.
There's only one rule in stand-up, which is that you have to be funny. Yet 99 per cent of comics look and talk exactly the same.
I was 25 myself once. I also thought I knew everything. I also thought that I could give singers singing advice and comics comedy advice. When you're that age, you know it all, so I understand it. But when you're tired and you don't have patience for it, you definitely snap.
For a while I felt very alone; sort of out there in the world of comics, especially here in the States.
I think you can do anything with comics that you could do in just about any art form.
I must have been 3 years old or less, and I remember paging through these comics, trying to figure out the stories. I couldn't read the words, so I made up my own stories.
Whether it be in comics, games or film, you can trace the art direction and influences back to some earlier, real-life historic period or artistic movement.
I'd been familiar with comics, and I'd collected 'em when I was a kid, but after I got into junior high school, there wasn't much I was interested in.
I think comics have far more potential than a lot of people realize.
In the sixties and seventies you could probably name all the great comics. It was still special.
There are comics who treat women fairly appallingly. But I can be great friends with them because I don't tend to do that ticking of boxes: it can make life too simplistic.
Comics is a great medium to get a lot of stories out.
I continue to be disappointed that people don't try and diversify the kind of work they are doing in comics.
My mother wouldn't even let me read DC Comics. I came from a very strict background.
Comics shouldn't be 'tools' for anyone's agenda except for the characters. And I am speaking only of super hero action comics. I love many of the alternative comics that are like journalistic stories. Documentary comics, a mix of reportage and fiction. Those are just great.
I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.
I have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn't include someone the size of the Hindenburg.
I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.
I'm only 24 so I like to think I'm still close enough to 17 to still remember what it was like. Besides, I could just fake it and get away with it... it's not like there are any teenagers that still read comics.
