Jim Woodring Quotes

Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts - a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff - but we certainly don't think of them adding up over time to some larger portrait of our times.

I like movies that are specific. Movies that home in on a very specific subculture, a specific discipline, a specific world.

For screenwriting, when you're writing, you're talking to hundreds - hundreds of people who might be interpreting what you're saying. When you're writing a comic book, you're really only talking to the artist.

I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.

When I approached Volume 1 of 'Lucid,' I realized I could tell something that only exists in four issues, or I could roll the dice a bit and approach this as Season 1 of a TV show.

I do like to work on a Marvel method, so if I've got the opportunity, and the writer is happy to do it, I like to have a writer detail what happens on a page, but not saying what happens in every scene.

It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don't, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don't need to have all this talking.

I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.

Film has to describe and show.

So much of comics are dictated by characters talking to one another - or in focused spaces where 'the camera' has to stay in pretty close on what's going on.

I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.

The only thing approaching art in a movie is the script.

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.

I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.

I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.

The reason most novelists are not good screenwriters is that you don't have time for a lot of details. Novelists can really create a richer experience for the reader and have many subplots. You only have 90 pages because each page is a minute of screentime. You have to have certain things happen by certain pages, a certain story arc in the movie.

Usually, if you read a script by somebody else and there's a dense page of stage directions, people just skip through it or speed read it.

I had written for the theater and didn't know that I knew how to write for film. Ultimately, I think it's just trusting your voice, trusting your characters, and then telling them in a different medium.

Some things that work in a comic don't work in a film, and vice versa.

Writing a graphic novel is hard. It feels closer to a screen play than to a novel.

I guess television is so much on the word. It's so much closer to playwriting - the scale is more just about the voices and the internal lives. Movies, it's a very different canvas.

Whenever you write script without a director, you put in things that point toward a style in which the story will be told, a subjective style.

'Piku' was driven by subtleties. Most films come with the padding of the sound, the visual, the drama.

My agent will say, 'Well, it's another graphic novel.' I don't care. It's better writing than anything else that's out there. The characters are much better.