Comic Career Quotes

I knew at an early age that I wanted to pursue comedy.

I just wanted to be a good comic and had no sense of show business, but at some point you want the opportunity to write a show about your life.

I knew I really wanted to work in comics in 1979.

For most of my career I did one comic a day, every day, including weekends and holidays.

I've never done a comedy club in my life. It's weird because I don't have the same background as most comics. I don't have a history of going up and only doing eight minutes.

If I wasn't a comic or TV star, I really wanted to be a photojournalist. That was my other dream job.

After graduating from high school, I worked at an advertising agency as a designer. After I left, I spent a year doing nothing in particular. At age 23, I drew my first comic.

Well I've made no secret of my life long love of MAD Magazine, it's probably my first and greatest influence in terms of my comic sensibilities. I've known John [Ficarra] for many years, and we've been friends. About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea.

The first work I ever did in comics was for Archie Comics, and I didn't do that very long because I did other stuff.

Especially those first few years of my comic book career, I had no idea what was going to happen the next day.

I started off doing indie comics that I wrote and drew myself. I was doing those for ten years before I started to work for DC. The first book that I wrote for DC was for another artist. I did some backups in 'Adventure Comics' years ago starring The Atom. That's the first time that I ever wrote for another artist.

Most people haven't seen my dramatic work, but I did 10 years of theater before I ever became a comic. I'm just better known for comedy.

I'm very lucky that I have this other career that runs alongside my comic career, which is a film career, and I've been given this really lovely setup where they seem to make the movies very quickly as well.

I didn't write superheroes for the first 10 years of my comic career. I was just doing fan fiction. I wasn't thinking about superheroes at all, even though I loved them. I was raised by Watchmen and Dark Knight, so I was raised in with it's all been done, they don't worry about that.

I've been planning a chunk of time to myself for years now. It's been my intention to finish 'Astonishing X-Men,' 'I Am Legion' and 'Planetary' and then sort of 'disappear' from doing comic interiors for a couple of years. I'll pop up here and there with a short story or two, old promises to friends and all, but no major series work.