Comic Quotes - Page 14

• When I was there at Marvel, everybody thought if you could draw well and you could do sensational panels, that you were going to be a success. The truth is that no matter how good or bad you are as a draftsman, if you can't tell a story, you don't last in comics. ...About halfway through my stay at Marvel, I realized I was being paid to tell a story, not do a drawing. That's why my stuff is always rather simple and uncomplicated compared to a lot of guys.

  John Romita, Sr.

  Book, Simple, Drawing

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• Almost everyone working in mainstream comics started off as a starry-eyed kid reading and loving comics. We're all fans, and that's great. But when we start working on company-owned comics professionally, we have to think like storytellers instead of fans. Editors aren't looking to hire the biggest fans of the characters. They're looking to hire the best creators with the best ideas.

  Greg Pak

  Book, Reading, Character

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• The good news is that the comics field is small enough and informal enough that once you have made a comic, you have achieved your dreams: you have broken into the comics industry. The problem with breaking in, though, is that staying in is harder.

  Greg Pak

  Dream, Book, Broken

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• The dirty little secret about comics is that the wall to getting published is actually not that high. You can publish your own comic. You can have your comic printed by the same people that print Marvel and DC and Image's comics for, I think, it's about $2,000 for a print run. So you can Kickstart it and get your own comic made. It depends on what is considered success to you. So if you need to be published by the Big Two to feel that you've made it, well, you should start working very hard.

  Kelly Sue DeConnick

  Running, Wall, Book

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• What keeps this industry alive is creators doing their own work. Once you change a costume or origin enough times, it's a dead body - you're just electrocuting it and keeping it sort of shambling on. There is a lot more creator-owned stuff now, and some of it I look at and go, 'Oh, that's his pitch for a TV show. That's his pitch for a movie. That's him saying oh, this kind of thing sells.' I didn't do that.

  Mike Mignola

  Book, Tv Shows, Body

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• One of the greatest sins in any story is false suspense. The kind of 'suspense' that disintegrates the moment you give your reader one second to think about it. And it's an easy trap to fall into, so watch carefully for it. If your story hinges on the question, 'Will Superman be pushed so far in his battle against Lex Luthor that he'll have to kill him?', or if your big cliffhanger moment is, 'Wow, is Spider-Man really dead this time?', then I understand Food Lion is hiring.

  Mark Waid

  Book, Fall, Men

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• I see this with experienced writers, too: They worry so much about the plot that they lose sight of the characters. They lose sight of why they are telling the story. They don't let the characters actually speak. Characters will start to dictate the story in sometimes surprising, emotional, and funny ways. If the writers are not open to those surprises, they're going to strangle the life, spark, or spirit out of their work.

  Brian Michael Bendis

  Book, Character, Emotional

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• ... And we talk it out. Lately, I've had Roy Thomas come in, and he sits and makes notes while we discuss it. Then he types them up, which gives us a written synopsis. Originally - I have a little tape recorder - I had tried taping it, but then I found no one on staff has time to listen to the tape again later. But this way he makes notes, types it quickly, I get a carbon, the artist gets a carbon ... so we don't have to worry that we'll forget what we've said.

  Stan Lee

  Book, Artist, Giving

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• We were pregnant at the time, and while I was out there I started to realize that if I had a daughter, there would come a day when I would have to apologize to her for my profession. I would have to apologize for the way it treats and speaks to women readers, and the way it treats its female characters.

  Matt Fraction

  Daughter, Book, Character

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• Some people are worried about the future of comics and some people are busy building it. That latter group are my heroes.

  Gail Simone

  Book, Hero, People

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• In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it.

  Mark Waid

  Running, Book, Editors

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• I've become really aware of all the subtle things you can communicate through the art and how you're presenting a character, particularly someone like Wonder Woman, who means so much to so many people.

  Cliff Chiang

  Art, Book, Character

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• When coming up with Wonder Woman cover designs, sometimes people will pitch ideas to me, either the writer or the editor. And it's interesting, because I know they're not trying to, but they end up pitching things that end up feeling like damsel-in-distress covers, where the tension comes from her needing to be rescued somehow. And it's something I immediately push back against.

  Cliff Chiang

  Book, Editors, Ideas

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• I realize that this is not what you want to put on a cover with Wonder Woman emblazoned on it. She could be in trouble, but she doesn't need to be completely out of control. So whenever I'm doing these covers, I try to make sure that there's an element where, even if there is danger, it's not something where agency is taken away from her.

  Cliff Chiang

  Book, Taken, Agency

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• I want her to be powerful on these covers, and sometimes that's a quiet power and other times it's a more bombastic power. But when you're going to have a book out there that's called Wonder Woman and she's on it, you have a responsibility to put out a certain kind of image.

  Cliff Chiang

  Powerful, Book, Responsibility

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• I regret that he didn't do anything about it, even though he was at least a head taller than me. I wouldn't have minded bleeding at all for one more opportunity to give the kind of Bat Lesson that Finger, Robinson, Sprang and others only dreamed of.

  Jim Steranko

  Regret, Book, Opportunity

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• No other serial publications carry a number on them that is of any weight to their readership. The number is there to serve a function, but it has no intrinsic value in and of itself. It's comfort food and nostalgia at best. On this, we follow what you and your fellow readers do more than what you say. We hear complaints about renumbering every time we do it, but every time we do it it results in higher sales, which is the whole ballgame - so if it were your time and your effort, what would you do?

  Tom Brevoort

  Book, Numbers, Effort

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• It starts with the writing. We have to think of all these characters - we have to treat them all equally. We have to think of them as having an interior life and having motivations. When I'm drawing female characters, I'm looking for that. I'm looking for subtext. I'm looking for ways to make the reader relate to them in a way that goes beyond the pure aesthetic value. You know, just drawing an attractive woman really gets kind of boring after a while.

  Cliff Chiang

  Motivation, Book, Writing

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• When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing. This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can. If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.

  Neil Gaiman

  Art, Book, Possible And Impossible

  Neil Gaiman's Commencement Address at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, www.uarts.edu. May 17, 2012.

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• It's an interesting job, it's a fascinating job, I can't imagine anything that would have given me more satisfaction, and not everything I did was awful, but it was just writing another story in a world that's full of stories.

  Dennis O'Neil

  Jobs, Book, Writing

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• I remember attending Toronto Comicon shortly after the release of Captain Marvel and seeing a five-year-old girl who'd come in a handmade Captain Marvel outfit with her hair moussed up - and I totally got the need for this book, for this hero. Someone who looks like her, and acts like her. So, in a way, Captain Marvel helped pave the road to the expanded role of female leads.

  Axel Alonso

  Girl, Book, Hero

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• The reader is not the customer. The retailer is the customer. So I try to have as much interaction with the retailers as possible because those are my customers.

  Kelly Sue DeConnick

  Book, Trying, Reader

  Interview with Christopher ZF, thestake.org. January 30, 2014.

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• Comic book readers are just as abandoned by the corporate system as the creators, despite the importance supposedly given their hard-earned dollars. The average comics shop can offer only a tiny fraction of an industrywide selection that is itself extremely limited in scope. And even when readers know exactly what they want, the search can be maddeningly futile.

  Scott McCloud

  Book, Average, Dollars

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• The idea that comics stores, distributors and publishers simply 'give the customers what they want' is nonsense. What the customers wanted they didn't get - and they left.

  Scott McCloud

  Book, Ideas, Giving

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• As I see it, mainstream comics now speak only to the hardcore few who stayed; conversing in a weird, garbled, visual pig latin only they can understand - rendering the term 'mainstream' a hollow joke - while the true mainstream, the other 99.9% of the populace, find enjoyment elsewhere.

  Scott McCloud

  Latin, Book, Pigs

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