“Embrace the fact that you will be a colossal failure. You are going to spectacularly fail. And then you will remind yourself that every single person you have ever admired, just like you, tried something and fell on their ass so hard they bounced.
BUT you admire them because they picked themselves up, learned something, and did better, then did it again, and again, and again.”
BUT you admire them because they picked themselves up, learned something, and did better, then did it again, and again, and again.”
“To expect writers to avoid subjects that gnaw at them is to not really understand what it is to be a writer.”
— Mark Russell (March 2017), on keeping politics out of comics
“In my work, hiding in plain sight, is always how I feel about the world. … It would be impossible to avoid [politics] and expect the reader to be engaged. One of the functions of art is to show the world the way an artist views it, and maybe not how you see it.”
“There are no magic answers. You just gotta do the work.”
— Jamie McKelvie (February 2017)
“There’s no comic book [script] format that’s universally agreed upon. All you need to do is be able to write in a way your collaborators – your artist, a colorist, a letterer, an editor, whomever – can know what the hell you’re talking about. There’s a zillion samples by a zillion people out there.
For my money, the right way is the one that takes the least amount of typing. Your format isn’t the important part.”
For my money, the right way is the one that takes the least amount of typing. Your format isn’t the important part.”
“…It’s also almost always easier to edit something than to write something. So write anything. You can always delete it. At the absolute worst, by writing it, you’ve discovered one thing which ISN’T right. More likely, when it’s on the page you can sit back and realise what’s wrong with that take. What’s false? What’s missing? How can you change it to make it so?”
“When I started in comics, the printing was terrible, and so was the paper. We used the cheapest paper and printing presses, because comics were distributed widely to newsstands and grocery stores. As a result, the style of art in comics was created for the awful printing. We used heavy black outlines, because the color registration was so bad, the colors would spill out of the line, and the paper was so cheap the ink would bleed and splotch. We lettered by hand because typesetting was expensive.
By the ’90s, we were using the kind of high-quality printing and paper that magazine and book publishers used. We could finally reproduce paintings and pastels and photos. So it seems silly to me that we were still using an art style designed for a cheap lithographic process that was no longer in use.”
By the ’90s, we were using the kind of high-quality printing and paper that magazine and book publishers used. We could finally reproduce paintings and pastels and photos. So it seems silly to me that we were still using an art style designed for a cheap lithographic process that was no longer in use.”
“First you draw a picture. And then, get this, you draw another picture next to it.”
“If you are a writer then read and write. If you are an artist then read and draw. Nothing will make you better than doing the thing you want to do; be it writing or drawing. The more you do, the better you will get. The more you read and study your craft, the better you will become at it. If you love what you’re doing this shouldn’t be a chore, it should be a pleasure.”
— Andy Lanning (June 2015)
“I self-publish because it’s easiest. I want to make a book, I make the book, the book gets published. I don’t have meetings, I don’t have to change anything to make a publisher happy, I don’t have to argue about the format… and it’s just so much easier than dealing with a client.”
“There was no plan at all. I really had no idea what was on page three until I finished page two. It’s exciting to work that way. It’s like taking a guitar solo in the middle of a blues song. If you plan it out, it’s going to just lie there. You have to go with what you’re really feeling. Okay, sometimes it sucks. But sometimes you hit some gold.”
“Obviously, from a business point of view, you have to make sure that the line is earning its keep. But as a creative person, my belief has always been, once you stop experimenting and taking chances, you’re dead.”
“I’d argue that comics really never have been better than they are right now. There’s more opportunity than ever before and more ways to have a career with companies while also still keeping some autonomy. Image Comics are a huge part of that.”
“One of the things people don’t seem to get is that almost all art, in at least some way, is political. And comics are art.”
“One of the best bits of the internet is fandom. For all the ill it can do, fandom has helped people find their voices, and find others who are like them. Comics can certainly do that, and I think they do it best.”