Comic Art Quotes

The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all.

I felt the comics grew because they became the common man's literature, the common man's art, the common man's publishing.

The method of producing comics in Japan is very hectic, but it's also rewarding because it's possible to do both the story and art all by yourself. In this way, it's possibly to bring out one's individuality. If this idea appeals to you, I call on you to try drawing your own manga.

It's not movies and it's not "fine art.

" The beauty of a comic is that it's clear, direct communication. My work is getting simpler and more cartoony because I'm much more interested in communication now than in any illustrative value.

The term comics long ago became obsolete and inaccurate.

It merely defined the content of the early joke-based comical strips. Sequential Art is a more accurate description of the form. I first suggested it because I believed something needed to be done to correct the feeling of inferiority by artists and writers in this field.

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.

Artists are not your art monkeys. They are your collaborators. They should be given all due consideration to follow their journey.

Comics as art. I do comics as comics, and my opportunity to tell stories. Simple. Basic. Let the characters have the excitement, not the package. That's where I come from.

I love telling stories. And even in single images, I tend to have stories inside them. I've always loved film, but I was making drawings and paintings and photographs. And you put art and narrative together, and that really is comics.

Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

Comics, at least in periodical form, exist almost entirely free of any pretense;

the critical world of art hardly touches them, and they're 100% personal.

I am a huge comic book fan, and I love everything vintage: cars, movies, music, art, and style - especially the 1950s style.

I went to art school, and that's how I got the internship, and then I started a band. But I always missed comics, I always wanted to do them.

An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy.

It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic.

Although I'm certainly glad cartoons are finally getting some respect as an art, I'm fairly ambivalent to see cartooning as a legitimate academic offering. If comics need to be deconstructed and explained, something is really wrong with them.

I am interested in Icons, not just religious works but also contemporary icons.

I also like the way the Pop movement of the 60s took subjects from consumer products and people - soup cans, comic books, film stars - and elevated them through art, just like in traditional iconography.

It's gratifying to hear that from people who care about comic art.

I never know what to make of it when someone writes to say, "Calvin and Hobbes is the best strip in the paper. I like it even more than Nancy."

My real background was in art studies.

At the beginning I was a painter, then I was this graphic designer, then I became an illustrator, then I was a comic artist. But for me it's a different way of expression, a different field of art. They're not separated; everything for me is related.

Cartooning isn't really drawing, any more than talking is singing.

.. The possible vocabulary of comics is by definition unlimited, the tactility of an experience told in pictures outside the boundaries of words, and the rhythm of how these drawings 'feel' when read is where the real art resides.

The big problem for comic art is you don't want to overwork it.

If a drawing is overworked it isn't funny. It's the spontaneity that keeps a work fresh and funny. If they can see how hard you work, if they can see the beads of sweat, it's no good. I always try to make it look easy.

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.

I loved underground comics and psychedelic art.

I did like some supernatural horror, but mainly fantasy. I was into escapism.

Comic art is just different. It's art on its own terms.

I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.

We probably put about four or five comic books out a year and probably about two or three art books and various trade paperbacks - maybe four or five of those a year - and that's what we do now.

I like good stories above all else... and kickin' art really goes the final stretch to ensure a comic is good.

I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.

A comic is a way of literally experiencing someone else's vision with a purity that I don't think any other medium offers; there are no technical, electronic or financial limitations; one only has to work harder to improve. Lately I think a new attitude has prevailed that comics aren't inherently an Art form, but that some cartoonists are genuinely artists.

I loathe high/low art distinctions in any case, so the crossing and re-crossing of that line is an act to be savored and celebrated, regardless of how it turns out. I consider that transgressive aspect of the medium one of its great strengths. In the way comics is both words and pictures while being neither, comics is the Trickster's medium, and as such I would be happy if no one ever knew what to do with it.

Art uses many different styles, but his voice is very consistent.

He's always concise and clever and funny. That's true of somebody like Chris Ware, who has an emotional quality to his work - but it's boiled down and it's very sober and spare. Each word has great weight. Comics are not just pictures, but it is graphic design in the sense that they are composed and architected in a specific way.

All our songs are about real people, true events.

We do write about DC Comics and things like The Replacements. It's pretty much good conversations that happen at Art Brut shows. It's like making friends - like a Wanted ad: "Man that likes the Replacements and DC Comics wants friends to drink with at venue tonight. Who's coming?" It's like that.

I do think comics are a dying art form because newspapers are a dying medium.

But it's not to say that in the next generation, where there's people getting their news electronically, comics won't survive. Right now, they're still largely attached to the newspaper world. And the more they can break away from that, the more they have a chance to live on.

Seriously, if you want to get inside the head of a stand-up comic, you could do a lot worse than reading Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, all about how he developed his career and his creativity as a comedian. Lots of what he talks about is relevant to anyone in the creative arts - you find yourself, your voice, your technique and then maybe luck calls.