A collection of interesting quotes from this week:
“Aunt May is very old. And her husband is dead. I just want you to consider that before you do anything crazy like trade your life as you know it for hers. I know you love her. We all do. But seriously, she is, like, what? 150 years old now? She probably wants to die. And she certainly doesn’t want you throwing your life away so she can live the last six months or whatever of hers.
“Also, incidentally, your comic books suck.”
– blogger Rachelle Goguen, in her message to Spider-Man
“The character designs — what is it that makes them so appealing? I can’t figure it out. ‘Appealing’ is the only word that seems to fit — they’re not ‘cute,’ exactly, or ‘pretty,’ or ‘dynamic,’ or at least, insofar as they are, that’s not what I like about them. They’re the visual equivalent of a catchy song: they draw the eye and hold it. Even long before I read the manga or watched the anime, I saw Naruto-related art all over the internet, and it was always distinctive and attractive. Masashi Kishimoto certainly has the ‘it factor’.”
– blogger Katherine Farmar, finally giving in to Naruto
“I’m sure that it exists to some degree, but I saw no negativity, no beefs, no snark, no rivalries. It was just this great show where comics are art, and I use that word properly, not capital-A art or art with finger quotes around it but a legitimate art form, like it should be everywhere. Imagine an industry that’s truly balanced, where the overall output resembles more the catalog from First Second than it does the Marvel insert in Previews. Where instead of being stuck in a warehouse convention center somewhere, the show warrants an immense outdoor set-up in one of the most beautiful medieval cities in Europe?”
– writer Brian Wood, on the comics festival in Lucca, Italy
“Why, in 1983, DC suddenly decided to publish one (1) adventure comic for girls is something of a mystery, and Amethyst’s failure to reach its target demographic is suggested by the fact that 90% of the letters in the ‘Purple Prose’ column are from adult men who already buy twenty other DC comics. But it could have been big; after all, Tokyopop built its entire empire upon Sailor Moon, a license that every other American publisher rejected because everybody knew that girls’ comics didn’t sell.”
– cartoonist/editor Shaenon K. Garrity, on DC’s Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld
“I think nostalgia will only ever take you so far; I once tried writing Judge Dredd on nothing but nostalgia, and failed pretty much 100%. For me to take an interest, stories have to be about something, have to matter, have to have meaning — unless we’re talking about pure farce, which has its own attractions.”
– writer Garth Ennis, on his new Dan Dare series
“I was young and stupid and I thought that I had every right to be there and that they gave me the job because I deserved it. And maybe I did and maybe I didn’t; that’s for somebody else to decide. In a lot of ways, I was terribly naïve when I came in and I was lacking a lot of the detailed continuity knowledge that I now have. If I had for a moment really thought about what it was to be writing Batman, I would have freaked out and run screaming. You know? ‘Cuz it’s Batman and it’s huge! I mean, it is huge, that’s a character that is known around the world. If you think about that for too long, you get horribly intimidated by it.”
– writer Greg Rucka, on his early work for DC and Marvel
“In recent years, DC Comics has played up the notion that the Justice League of America are essentially the A-list of the superhero set, and make all the other, more obscure characters feel like cast of The Hills at an Oscar party. Maybe once this movie comes out, they won’t feel so bad!”
– New York magazine’s Matthew Perpetua, on rumored casting for the Justice League of America movie
