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All Quotes by author - Dave Gibbons
" Comics are a particularly esoteric field where you really learn how to do it, by doing it or by learning from other practitioners. "
Doing
How
You
" Comics is all about making it believable and helping people to get completely lost in a fictional world. "
Helping People
Lost
World
" I always start drawing any job by planning out to some degree the locales and trying to nail the characters. If they're existing characters, I'll draw them several times on rough paper just to get a feeling for them. The ideal when you're drawing a comic is to have everything in your head, not to have to refer to notes. "
You
Planning
Start
" I came to think that nobody from England could draw American comic books, because they were clearly all done by this sort of Mafia, all these guys with Italian and Irish names who had the whole thing sewn up. It was actually seeing a comic book drawn by Barry Smith, who was about my age, and English. "
Done
Seeing
Think
" I don't think schooling of any sort really prepares you for real life. I don't know if art school would have prepared me to draw comics. Half of the people I know in comics went to art school, half of them didn't. Some of them went and dropped out. "
Me
Think
School
" If you're using a computer as an artist and expressing your personal vision, I think your personal vision comes through. "
Vision
You
Artist
" If you want to draw comics, you really have to love to draw, as you will be spending many hours sitting down with a pencil or pen in your hand. "
Pencil
You
Love
" I generally like very visually striking films. I love a lot of Stanley Kubrick's films. I would have to say 'Dr. Strangelove', which of course has got resonance in 'Watchmen'. It's a favorite movie of mine. "
Favorite
Like
Love
" I'm known for being very enthusiastic about using technology. A lot of the attraction is the way that it streamlines the process and takes a lot of the drudgery out of it. "
Technology
Process
Attraction
" In comics, there are depths that don't reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about 'Watching the Watchmen' - like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air - might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it. "
Watching
You
Air
" I really like it when you can step outside of what's come before and find a surprise for the reader and find a surprise for yourself. "
You
Yourself
Find
" I think if you want to do a thing properly you have to take a lot of care. I've always found it's easier to draw comics if you know clearly in your head what you're drawing, rather than if you try and make it up as you go along. "
Drawing
Care
Know
" I think probably the first time I wanted to be an artist was when I was about six or seven years old. I used to get British comics and I clearly remember seeing my first American comic: an issue of 'Action Comics', with Superman on the cover with a treasure horde in a cave, and Lois saying something like 'I don't believe Superman is a miser!' "
Believe
American
Saying
" I think readers are always patient. Look at the 'Harry Potter' series. Some have given up on this generation of kids as game and TV addicts, but lots of people spend lots of time patiently reading through hundreds of pages of dense prose. I think reading a comic by comparison is a lot more immediate. "
Game
People
Look
" I think the problem with the term graphic novel is it sounds pompous, it sounds pretentious, whereas on the continent, they call it an album, which to me sounds, it's got more much of a connotation of a kind of a music single and an album collection. "
Music
Problem
Think
" I think with something like 'Watchmen' you can genuinely call that a graphic novel because it has the weight and the intent of a proper novel and it also is the complete story. "
You
Think
Story
" I've always felt that the comic strip medium stands equally beside all the other story telling mediums: novels, movies, stage plays, opera, you know, you name it. "
Know
Story
You
" I vividly remember my first 'Superman' comic, which my granddad bought me when I was about 7. From that point on, all I wanted to do is draw comics. And specifically, superhero and science fiction comics. Basically I used to copy comic books, and draw my own comics on scrap paper. "
Me
My Own
Copy
" Madefire is igniting a new era by creating a modern, dynamic reading experience and bringing that to the millions of iPad users around the world. "
Experience
World
Creating
" One of the attractions for me of having 'Watchmen' made into the first Motion Comic was just that - it was breaking new ground. "
New
Just
Me
" One of the things when you're drawing a comic book is that you're spending four or five times as long to draw it as the writer takes to write it. In my career I've had to spend a week drawing something that a writer has thrown out in an hour. And there's nothing worse than having to work on something that no previous thought has gone into. "
Week
Work
Thought
" One of the things you have to be able to do, as a comic strip artist, is to draw things repeatedly from a variety of angles, so you need references, and you find the best picture you can. "
Picture
Find
Best
" People unacquainted with graphic novels, including journalists, tend to think of 'Watchmen' as a book by Alan Moore that happens to have some illustrations. And that does a disservice to the entire form. "
Book
Form
Think
" There are people who specialise in lettering, and I've had my hand lettering made into a digital font. I picked up a copy of the 'Dandy' the other week, and I was amazed to see that it was completely lettered in my hand-lettering font. It was quite a thrill, really, having been a 'Dandy' reader years and years ago. "
People
Digital
Hand
" There's a thing with genre movies and science fiction movies that number two is the charmed; two seems to be the best. I loved 'Terminator 2.' "
Science
Two
Seems
" To my mind, the most successful and the best comic book illustrators are those who translate the real world into a consistent code. If you look at Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, their drawings look nothing like the real world, but they are internally consistent. In terms of a comic book it can work just fine. "
World
Work
Mind
" When I first came to New York City, what I was thrilled about was not the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty; it was the fireplugs in the street. These things that Jack Kirby had drawn. Or these cylindrical water towers on top of buildings that Steve Ditko's 'Spider-Man' fights used to happen in and around. "
Water
Building
City
" When you're drawing something, you kind of run a movie in your head. You might close your eyes or stare into the distance and kind of see a movie unfolding and, you know, grab a certain moment or think, 'Oh, yeah, that's when we need just the point that he appears around the corner but just as she's getting into the car,' you know? "
Run
Moment
Think
" With the 'Watchmen' comic, we attempted to tell it in an accessible way. I deliberately made the artwork very clear, deceptively so. You think you're sucking on a sweetie, but it turns out to be a sugar-coated chili. "
Clear
Think
Way
" You eventually come to the conclusion that there's only so much you can do with these established characters, and you start wondering who among us will be the one to create the next 'Superman' or 'Batman' or 'James Bond' or next 'Lone Ranger.' "
Superman
Will
Create
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