Quotes from Scott McCloud

In comics at its best, words and pictures are like partners in a dancer and each one takes turns leading.

Learn from everyone. Follow no one. Watch for patterns. Work like hell.

Amplification through simplification.

The natural world creates great beauty every day, yet the only rules of composition it follows are those of function and chance.

I guess the basic difference is that animation is sequential in time but in spatially juxtaposed as comics are. Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space--the screen--while each frame of comics must occupy a different space. Space does for comics what time does for film!

All the things we experience in life can be separated into two realms, the realm of the concept and the realm of the senses.

To be a "thing" that thinks and moves and wants...that's MIRACULOUS.

I'm back, boys and girls! back from the pink padded couch palace!

Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without-- --and through the cartoon, the world within.

This phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole has a name. It's called closure. In our daily lives, we often commit closure, mentally completing that which is incomplete based on past experience.

Think of your face as a mask. That's what it is, after all. A mask. Facing outward. Worn from the day you were born. Slave to your every mental command. Seen by everyone you meet. But never by you. Open its eyes now. Just think it. The mask will obey.

The panel acts as a sort of general indicator that time or space is being divided. The durations of that time and the dimensions of that space are defined more by contents of the panel than by the panel itself.

We all live in a state of profound isolation. No other human being can ever know what it's like to be you from the inside. And no amount of reaching out to others can ever make them feel exactly what you feel. All media of communication are a by-product of our sad inability to communicate directly from mind to mind.

Ask any writer or filmmaker or painter just how much of a given project truly represents what he/she envisioned it to be. You'll hear twenty percent...ten...five...few will claim more than thirty. The master of one's medium is the degree to which that percentage can be increased, the degree to which the artist's ideas survive the journey -- or, for some artists, the degree to which the inevitable detours are made useful by the artist.

So this is it. This is the Great Escape. Is it wrong for us to want this? I keep thinking, if there are so many worlds, who decided which one to put us on? No one asked us what we wanted. Don't we have the right to look for something more? We'll be back; we know we can't stay away forever. But just for a while...just for a while.

Comics offers tremendous resources to all writers and artists:faithfulness, control, a chance to be heard far and wide without fear of compromise...it offers range and versatility with all the potential imagery of film and painting plus the intimacy of the written word. And all that's needed is the desire to be heard--the will to learn--and the ability to see.

Just as pictures and the intervals between them create the illusion of time through closure, words introduce time by representing that which can only exist in time--sound.

All through my comics career, I was always trying to reinvent the form.

There's a very big part of me that just wants to take all of comics history and toss it on the bonfire. I'd sort of like to get on to the future.

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.

Learn from everyone. Follow no one. Watch for patterns. Work like hell.

Today, comics is one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard.

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.