George Perez Quotes

In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

The only place where you can really surprise or shock the reader, or make someone laugh, is on the lower righthand corner - the very last panel - so as you turn the page, the payoff is in the upper lefthand panel. To pace every story so that there's a setup and a payoff at the page turn was a huge challenge; it's a part of the medium and you really have to learn what can be done in the medium.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

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.

My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling.

There has to be the right pacing of images to tell the story. I'm always stunned at how little you can put in.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

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.

When I'm writing comics, I'm also visualizing how the story will look on the page - not even always art-wise, but panel-wise, like how a moment will be enhanced dramatically by simply turning a page and getting a reveal. It requires thinking about story in a way I never had to consider when I was writing prose.

Cinema is a visual medium one has to communicate through visuals, and therefore, dialogues should be less.

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.

I'm really trying to focus on the storytelling, more so than ever before I think, partly because it makes for easier pages.

We start out talking about the story, trying to figure out who is who and what should happen, taking notes the whole time. Then I do a rough layout of the issue, showing what happens on each page. Then we discuss that some more.

With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.

I draw on a lot of cinematic influences like Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders, artists who let a story take its time. Comics are a visual medium, and visuals should be allowed to tell some of that story.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

I know as a child, I was really interested in becoming a manga artist, to create my own stories and illustrate them and present something that people would be interested in reading and looking at as well.

I'm not particularly good at page layouts. I make an effort to stay out of the way of the artist. What I'll try to express instead is, 'What we're going for here on this page is the idea of the containment of these women's bodies. So I want them framed as though they're bursting out of the panel borders.'

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.

My drawing skills probably froze around when I was 18... Now I'm more interested in the story, how the drawings, the layout can help express the stories and communicate them.

Comics are not theatre - there's a very important difference in that the reader controls the page. You can linger on a page of comics as long as you want. You can read and go forward and then move back; you can reread, in one sitting or at your leisure. You can take as much time as you want to take in that story.

In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.

Comics don't work without the visuals, obviously.