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Comic book characters are characters who wear costumes. They're not necessarily different than other characters. The trend I think that you're seeing are comic book movies, at least the ones that Marvel makes, don't have comic book stories. They have dramatic human stories.
Sep 10, 2025
You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.
I couldn't read. I just scraped by. My solution back then was to read classic comic books because I could figure them out from the context of the pictures. Now I listen to books on tape.
I'm kind of a comic book geek, but I'm not really a super hero comic book geek.
When you write comic books and when you are writing for television, you're not writing the end product, you are writing notes for someone else to make the end product essentially. My scripts are just directions for the artist to draw pages and the pages are what is seen. I kind of feel like it's a safety net, you're able to hide behind the art to a certain extent, and in television you're able to hide behind the actors and the production, but with novels, your words are it
Underground comics were produced by individuals - they were the auteur variety, rather than the production-line sort of comic book aimed at pleasing a vast general audience. Mainstream comics never appealed to me: they seemed sterile in their stylistic consistency, and were quickly consumed, the stories interesting only for so long as you were reading them.
There have been so many interpretations of both Batman and the Joker in the comic books themselves over the decades, from one extreme to the next, and in the media, from one extreme to the next.
I'm a huge comic book fan - me and the kids.
There's almost a universe as big as the Marvel Universe with X-Men. I mean, Deadpool is something I think everybody was taken surprise by, except for the people who read the comic book.
If you're 25 years old dressed up like Superman at a comic book convention, that's great. If you're 78 and you're doing it, something's wrong.
I love comic books. I was weaned on them, so it's not like it's a stretch for me, but I have other interests, as well.
I do know that people enjoy reading a comic book and saving it and collecting the comics. And sharing them and trading them with friends. That may be something you can't do as easily with digital comics.
It's turned into a world of amateurs. There are amateur actors making millions of dollars, amateur cinematographers, amateur directors... Jesus, these amateur directors can get deals for anything. Another comic book? Oh, very good.
When I was developing the [TV Series "Daredevil"] idea, we were really doing something closer to what was in the comic book. By that, I mean in terms of civilians in the street knew that superpowers were an everyday matter of fact. When it finally ended up at Netflix, they really decided to land it in the Marvel Universe that exists in the cinematic universe. That changes the story entirely. It was no longer about the other, which is what that metaphor was. It's really more about the character herself, which I love.
There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - were talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.
All the other editors at DC never gave me a moment's time. They would take the thing and give me a check and say, 'I'll see you in two weeks.' They never gave any kind of encouragement or information. They were very competitive with each other. They didn't want to teach an artist and then lose him to some other editor.
Tick is a cartoon character, I don't know if you're familiar with him. This is the third step in his evolution. Comic book to cartoon to, now, live-action.
As many people have pointed out, the scene in ‘Kung Fu Hustle’ where the Landlady was chasing after me resembled the Roadrunner, … I loved to watch cartoons and read comic books when I was small. In fact, I still watch and read a lot of them now. They give me great ideas.
Luckily, what you trade off in not being part of the comic book canon and not having some literature that you can use to your benefit, in terms of figuring out who you are, you gain in the ability to just be whoever you want to be.
My fan fiction is canon.
I'm a massive comic book fan. I was buying weekly installments of "The Watchmen", and "From Hell", and "Parallax" and "Johnny Nemo". I was a huge comic book fan as a kid and I still am. Me and my youngest son are both comic book nerds together; make models and stuff.
The world of comic book collecting is not a pretty place. For a bunch of guys who like good-over-evil stories, you sure meet a lot of morally bankrupt assholes.
I used to be embarrassed because I was just a comic-book writer while other people were building bridges or going on to medical careers. And then I began to realize: entertainment is one of the most important things in people's lives. Without it they might go off the deep end. I feel that if you're able to entertain people, you're doing a good thing.
I think every filmmaker makes different choices. I remember in the early days, in some of the early comic book movies, certain white dissolves were used that would try to emulate the look and feel of comic book panel borders. Sometimes they would frame shots in panels or circles that gave it a real comic book feel.
Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.
As you've witnessed, Catwoman is the ultimate diva. From the pages of comic books to both small and big screens, Catwoman continues to evolve and mature like a true cat. Catwoman, is a unique breed, never taking the same form twice. But whatever form she takes, she'll always reign supreme. A dog maybe man's best friend, but a cat is everyone's favourite feline fatale.
I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you're reading comic books to the big screen.
Just like in the art museum, and notions of beauty and pleasure, if the hero is always a white guy with a squared jaw or pretty woman with big breasts, then kids start thinking that's how it's supposed to be. Part of the problem was that black comic book artists were making super heroes with the same pattern as the white super heroes. When you read a lot of those comics, the black super heroes don't seem to have anything to do.
Let me say something at the outset. The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media. This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions - "Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?" "Ben Carson, can you do math?" "John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?" "Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?" "Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?" How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?
One of the best things that happened for me as a playwright is becoming a comic-book writer.
Ultimately, there's always been a link between comic books and video games, and comic books and movies, and then basically all three steadily becoming this sort of transmedia.
The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.
There's a thing that creeps into this conversation ... that if you complain about the depiction of women [in comics], it becomes, 'Well, but ladies - the dudes are idealized too.' And the thing is that the dudes are idealized for strength and the women are idealized for sexual availability. It's very, very different. The women's costumes are cut in such a way that I could give a cervical exam to 90% of our heroines. And I don't have a medical degree! So if I can find it, that's impressive.
My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books.
If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.
There is not one piece of artwork I have ever done that lived up to the vision I had for it in my head. That's why I keep on trying. Maybe someday I'll do it. I don't want to be in the past. I want to get to the next thing.
In fact, I was too dumb to save any of the old comic books or the old artwork. I used to give them away.
I feel like what's most important for painting - which has been hierarchically on the top for a really long time in terms of what is considered fine art, by comparison with something like a comic book or what's considered low art - is that painting should open up laterally to include other cultures and things that don't immediately resonate as a painting but are obviously of equal contribution to the genre.
My characters are all kind of geek archetypes of people I've encountered at gaming and comic book conventions.
I love comic books and I love anime.
American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.
So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.
I was pretty nervous when I met Robert Kirkman. It's very strange to meet someone who created you. Andrea [ from The Walking Dead] is still very much alive and kicking, seven years into the comic book, so to meet Robert and be like, "Hi, I'm Andrea," I had to just hope that he was happy with the decision.
I drew the same things that most boys drew - airplanes and cars and fire engines. Then later on I discovered comic books, and I began to create my own comic stories. I was a comic writer, even when I was five or six years old. I would just make up stories because I thought it was fun.
Get inside her head. Get inside any character's head and ask what they want in this scene. And if you work from the perspective of what they want, there's not going to be any wrong answer. There's going to be some boring answers, but none of them are going to be wrong. As long as she has agency, then you're on the right track.
The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.
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.
We have a whole other division, where we actually literally take the comic book and animate it. Our feeling was that, if this was going to be our show and that it was going to be a brand new show, it has to be more adventures with these characters, in the same way that, through the years, there have been long runs on the comic book series. It's the same characters, with different voices, along the way.
The wish to be super strong is a healthy wish, a vital compelling, power-producing desire. The more the Superman-Wonder Woman picture stories build up this inner compulsion by stimulating the child's natural longing to battle and overcome obstacles, particularly evil ones, the better chance your child has for self-advancement in the world.
Look, I like gritty. I write gritty. There is a time and a place for gritty. I'll take my Batman gritty, thank you, and I will acknowledge that such a portrayal means that my 11-year-old has to wait before he sees The Dark Knight. But if Hollywood turns out a Superman movie that I can't take him to? They've done something wrong.