Quotes About Comics

I'm 44 now and have been working in comics for most of my adult life. I've been blessed to have had the career that I've had and worked with the many awesome creators I have.

When I was a boy, I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.

Television didn't arrive in our household until I was about 10, so my imagination would have been first stirred by the printed word. Comics and the public library.

I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren't just kid stuff.

Marvel has put out good product. DC has put out good product. Even Image has put out good product, as far as I'm concerned... although it's few and far between. But it's not getting recognized, no matter who's doing it.

What we're increasingly seeing is comics are becoming better known across the world. They're recording shows wherever they are, then putting them online for everyone. It has definitely changed in that way.

I like to read comics, and I'll listen to records, and I like to play pinball.

Red Sonja, she was a hellraiser before Buffy, Xena, and Ripley even existed. When so many heroines in comics were all hung up on romance and the bizarre gender politics of comics at the time, Sonja was out cutting off the heads of dragons and pirates.

A lot of people will refer to comics by number to me, and I'll realize they're expecting me to remember all the comics by number. And I can't even remember what I ate this morning, let alone which comic was #473!

Making comic adaptations means making a lot of choices - you need to adjust the pacing, the dialogue, and in this case, a lot of the cultural references.

I do like Hank Pym.

I'm not a big crossover person, I'll be honest. I try to keep 'Hellcat' separate from the larger Marvel world because I want it to be a book anyone can read, not just a hardcore comics fan.

Being a hardcore old-school comic book lover, it took me a while to accept the need for comic book movies.

Certain things work on paper held together with staples. Comics use bright colors to make things leap off the page, but movies are a different medium.

It's pretty simple, really: I love the X-Men. They were my favorite heroes when I was a kid. My dad and I collected X-Men comics together, and I know it would have made him proud to see me writing 'Uncanny X-Men.'

The great thing about working in comics is that visually, you're the sole voice. You have to figure out the staging, the lighting, the composition, the character emotions, the action. You get a script, but you're trying to work it out in individual panels. It's a terrific exercise in creative thinking and creative problem-solving.

Luckily for me, my father had impeccable taste. No contemporary collector was he. His treasure trove of comics included gems such as 'Little Lulu,' 'Frontline Combat' and 'Classics Illustrated.' But the works that stood head and shoulders above the rest were Carl Barks's 'Donald Duck' and 'Uncle Scrooge' comics from the 1940s through the 1960s.

The comics I read as a kid were all about guys in tights. But here was a guy who wore a fedora. He fought crime like they did in Marvel and DC, but he did it in the real world. I had just turned 12 when I met the Spirit and it was a strange coincidence. At the same time I discovered girls I fell out of love with guys in tights.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I had never come across the 'X-Men' comics till I was asked to play Magneto, so I just jumped into that job.

I kind of stumbled into comics in a roundabout way. One of the first films my father introduced me to was the 1989 'Batman,' the Tim Burton one.

Dichotomies are an inherent part of comics, aren't they? Comics are both pictures and words. They blend time and space. Many feature characters with dual identities like Bruce Wayne/Batman. Cartoonists also tend to live dichotomous lives because many of us have day jobs.

I grew up on monthly comics. My closet is full of monthly comics. I've always wanted to do a monthly comic, and while I've had a couple of offers, the timing has never worked out. Most superhero comics come into the world as monthly series, so we wanted the same for 'The Shadow Hero.'

Al Plastino helped redefine Superman in the 1950s. His work on 'Superman's Girlfriend,' 'Lois Lane,' 'Adventure Comics' and pretty much any title in the Superman family will be fondly remembered for years to come. He will be missed.