Quotes About Comics

Back in the olden days when we were rubbing sticks together, everybody wanted to have a comic strip, to live in Westport Connecticut, to have a Jaguar and to have a wife and two and a half kids and to have a girl in town in their studio in Manhattan that they'd romance, and then they'd have people ghost their strip. It was like this big dream.

I found this book that had every 'Peanuts' strip from 1952 to 1955 and read every one. Amazing. So now I can say I have become a big 'Peanuts' fan.

I was into the 'Dennis The Menace' comic strip long before I got into music, and it still makes me chuckle.

Humor strips dominated what were called the funny papers early in the century, but by the 1920s and '30s, adventure strips had taken over. With 'Beetle Bailey,' I revived the funny part of the funny papers, and I'd be proud to be remembered for that.

I hate Calvin and Hobbes. I think its a big re-hash of formula kid strips.

Well, I've done a lot of strips since I've been here about Zippy and me being in Connecticut.

My dad taught me to read by reading comic strips in the Saturday paper and Archie comics.

In general, daily strips were just a regular part of my childhood. So even if I wasn't a huge fan of most of those strips, I still read them religiously every morning while I ate my cereal.

For me, the very last great strip is 'Peanuts.' After 'Peanuts,' there are a very few strips that I enjoyed for different reasons, but I don't think they were great. I don't think anything's come along since Charles Schulz - and I mean since 1950 - that I think rises above the professional or the eccentric into that realm of greatness.

I can't even look at daily comic strips. And I hate sitcoms because they don't seem like real people to me: they're props that often say horrible things to each other, which I don't find funny. I have to feel like they're real people.

Women have been writing strong women characters for a long time - hello, Maxine Hong Kingston! - it's just taken mainstream comics a really long while to catch up.

The first comic I can remember ever reading was a 'Fantastic Four' issue that my dad bought out of the drugstore once. The thing that struck me about it was that the ending wasn't an ending. It was essentially a cliffhanger. It was the first time I had ever read anything like that, where you read a book, but the book isn't the book.

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 don't need to write comics for a living. I have movies and TV for that. I write comics for one reason and one reason only: I love comics. I love the form, the structure, the storytelling process, I love everything about it.

When 'American Born Chinese' started getting a lot of attention, I freaked out a little bit because I realized that up until then I had just been doing comics by following my gut. I didn't really know much about plot structure or anything; I kind of just followed my gut.

Comics creators are generally screwed in life: Most of us who are fortunate enough to do comics full time - which is very few of us - will literally draw until we die because we have no employment structures intact for retirement, much less insurance!

My favorite comics show the real-life struggles of heroes as well as the fantastical.

I'm not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.

I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.

To organize all my comics, I've been making custom cabinets.

Comics have years to explain this stuff, and in a movie, you have to focus on one thing. So it's about kind of streamlining, I think. Some of the most successful origin films actually have a narrower focus.

I'm a big believer that if you buy a comic, you ought to own it.

If I hadn't had the outlet of writing and drawing comics, I guess there's a good chance I wouldn't be around today.

Maybe this is because I'm a comics historian as much as anything else, but I really have a deep-seated respect for the characters that have been around since before I was born and are probably going to outlive me.