Comic Novel Quotes & Sayings

You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid. — Bill Watterson

Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes' integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to. Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen. — Flannery O'Connor

Every time you look up at the stars, it's like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you're the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the backyard with your best friend, eleven years old. Sixteen, driving alone, stopping at the edge of the city, looking up at the same stars. Walking a wooded path, kissing in the moonlight, look up and you're eleven again. Chasing cats in a tiny town, you're eleven again, you're sixteen again. You're in a rowboat. You're staring out the back of a car. Out here where the world begins and ends, it's like nothing ever stops happening. — Bryan Lee O'Malley

Cartoonists create so many cartoons on any given topic that we can follow the life cycle of a comic idea and how it evolves over time more quickly than we can with a form like the novel. — Robert Mankoff

That's the exciting part about capitalism. It's like surfing, you have to catch the wave. - Martin Peter (aka Vermin Gobsmack) — Jamie Delano

I firmly believe that if you can't fool all of the people all of the time you should start breeding them for stupidity. - Weisshaupt — Dave Sim

Executive Severance, a laugh out loud comic mystery novel, epitomizes our current cultural moment in that it is born from the juxtaposition of authorial invention and technological communication innovation. Merging creative text with new electronic context, Robert K. Blechman's novel, which originally appeared as Twitter entries, can be read on a cell phone. His tweets which merge to form an entertaining novel can't be beat. Hold the phone; exalt in the mystery-engage with Blechman's story which signals the inception of a new literary art form. — Marleen S. Barr

Show some respect. They were your grandparents. -Batman
Just names and dusty frames on the wall to me. -Damien
I take exception to that. There is not a speck of dust collecting on those portraits. -Alfred — Peter J. Tomasi

Warning: This read will cause lack of sleep! You wont want to put it down!

July 13, 2016 by Francine Baia
This was a long awaited novel in the Sword of the God series and it was most definitely well worth the wait. The author provides an all encompassing look into the inner thoughts and machinations of each character which is commanding. She tackles several serious subjects that are current in today's society, including PTSD and how it affects people differently and the devastation it causes on family. Several love stories are explored which keeps the readers on edge and wanting more. The integration of languages and cultures are seamless and readily understandable which bolsters the depth of the multiple storylines and at times is masterfully interlaced with comic relief. This is truly an enjoyable read that you will find difficult to put down. Anxiously anticipating the next installment! — Anna Erishkigal

Sweetie, you don't need to drive me to the brink of insanity ... I'm close enough to walk! — Tanya Masse

I'm sure this is a diversionary ploy. But that doesn't mean it isn't real.
-Abe Sapien — John Arcudi

The first novel I wrote, 'The White House Mess,' was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir. — Christopher Buckley

Does Batman ever NOT have a plan...? — Mark Waid

The comic book is not the book. the graphic novel is not the novel. The same, of course, is true of films and television. When we move a story from one medium to another, no matter how faithful we attempt to be, some changes are inevitable. Each medium has its own demands, own restrictions, its own way of telling a story. — George R R Martin

Throughout these pages, my brush weeps in sorrow for what happened in Tiananmen Square.

Not for the first time, a government was turning the guns on its people. Has the world learned nothing from history? — Morgan Chua

What did he say? He is in love? My brain stops, my heart stops, my blood ceases to flow. My appendages go weak and cold, and there is a suspension of all space and time as the universe comes into perfect alignment. — Julie Sarff

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. — Zadie Smith

Sometimes, if you close your eyes and keep still, you can be invisible. Ostriches know this." - Constantine — Jamie Delano

I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel - hell yeah, I'm going to do that. — Anthony Bourdain

Philip Galanes makes his debut with a novel that is both heartbreaking and deftly comic, the story of a young man struggling with his most primitive desires
wanting and needing. It is a novel about the complex relationships between parents and children, a story of loss and of our unrelenting need for acknowledgment, to be seen as who we are. And in the end it is simply a love story for our time. — A.M. Homes

One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality. — Art Spiegelman

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. — John Updike

Ifemelu opened her novel, Jean Toomer's Cane, and skimmed a few pages. She had been meaning to read it for a while now, and imagined she would like it since Blaine did not. A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They're right. We're not fighting for the people anymore, Falcon... Look at us. We're just fighting. — Mike Millar

Unlike novel characters, comic book characters last an eternity. When a character is changed beyond recognition, there's no longer the merchandising aspect. — Grant Morrison

You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium. — Adrian Tomine

I think that people are really hungry for original content. I think there's a sense of reboots and remakes, and we're lacking in any sense of originality in media. So, I think the people who want something like this which has a graphic novel feel or comic book feel but that is designed and created for the medium of television, I think that is something is very appealing to a lot of people. — Miles Millar

I havent been doin much comic book writing for the last several years though, as Ive been writing television projects and a novel. — Bill Mumy

I've been drawing since I could hold a pencil. I've got many ideas that are still to be drawn out, but the couple collaborations in development are with other actor/writers for graphic novel/comic that could potentially become a film project. — Jade Hassoune

Why do Jesus and Mary only appear on Mexican food? Huh? Answer me that? Nobody ever sees the face of God in a California roll. — Ken O'Neill

I won't read a new graphic comic novel until the writer has completed the entire series. I got burned a few times when I got turned on to a book, plowed through it only to find out the author was in the middle of writing the next. — Nick Offerman

Maybe I'd be a storyboard artist. Graphic novel/comic book artist. Backup dancer. Singer. It would be cool to focus on one of these full time. But I like seeing them all intertwine. — Jade Hassoune

Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool. — Iris Murdoch

I didn't read comic books, growing up. I was more of a science fiction/fantasy novel guy. I loved reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Tarzan' and that kind of stuff. — Jesse L. Martin

Death is complicated."

-Johann Kraus — John Arcudi

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel. — Colson Whitehead

Thanks to the comic book publishers. Batman and Captain Marvel were responsible for my learning to read at least a year before I showed up at school. They got me interested in writing. Started my first novel at about eight. The title: 'The Canals of Mars.' — Jack McDevitt

Have you noticed how Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen look nothing alike, and yet they both manage to look exactly like their father, Martin? — Ken O'Neill

Whenever you do something that's original, not based on a comic book or a novel or an old movie or a franchise, you definitely learn a lot and for I think it was very gratifying to see the people embrace the world. — Alfred Gough

To AMC's credit, I think what they saw was the show doesn't exist in the marketplace. They knew that there was a hunger for a martial arts show. They also knew that you have this strong tradition of martial arts cinema, so even though it's not branded by a novel or a comic book or an old movie or something, we do have the genre itself, which people love. — Alfred Gough

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno . — Italo Svevo

People are so afraid to say the word 'comic'. It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to 'graphic novel' and that disappears. — Marjane Satrapi

Peabody waved her PPC triumphantly. "It's the Kirk thing, The Enterprise thing. It reminded me I'd hit this name that made me snicker when I was running the van - the Cargo. Here it is. Tony Stark."
"Oh, baby." McNab blew her a double-handed kiss. "Good call."
"It's gotta be, right?" Peabody said to McNab. "It's his style."
"Who the hell is Tony Stark?" Eve demanded.
"Iron Man," Roarke told her. "Superhero, genius, innovative engineer, and billionaire playboy."
"Iron Man? You're talking about a comic book guy?"
"Graphic novel," Roarke and McNab said together. — J.D. Robb

In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings. — Dean Koontz

The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same. — Marjane Satrapi

Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city
in every cranium
in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed. — Michael Chabon

That partially due to the world of media and commerce, the idea of a comic book has been lost in the ghetto, whereas the graphic novel is now being held up as something to aspire to and as something that's respectable for adults to read. — Adrian Tomine

The last time I was this confused I was watching a Fassbinder film. — Ken O'Neill

I used to publish these stories in 32-page comics, and I would either do short stories or break the long ones up into chunks so there would be some variety inside the comic. But since then, people have been doing more and more long, standalone works, and the term 'graphic novel' has sort of become the codified term now. — Jim Woodring

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way. — Joyce Carol Oates

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way. — Iris Murdoch

I saw it all suddenly while I was reading Howards End . . . Forster's the only one who understands what the modern novel ought to be . . . Our frightful mistake was that we believed in tragedy: the point is, tragedy's quite impossible nowadays . . . We ought to aim at being essentially comic writers . . . The whole of Forster's technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers'-meeting gossip . . . In fact, there's actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones: that's what's so utterly terrific. It's the completely new kind of accentuation - like a person talking a different language . . . . — Christopher Isherwood

Being accused of making money by selling sex in Hollywood, home of the casting couch and the gratuitous nude scene, is so rich with irony that it's a better subject for a comic novel than a column ... On one coast the cops are busting sex workers on Eighth Avenue, dragging them downtown to night court where they pay the fine and go right back to their corner; on another they're charging Heidi Fleiss with pandering in a town in which the verb is an art form. — Anna Quindlen

My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel. — Sherman Alexie

As adults we choose our own reading material. Depending on our moods and needs we might read the newspaper, a blockbuster novel, an academic article, a women's magazine, a comic, a children's book, or the latest book that just about everyone is reading. No one chastises us for our choice. No one says, 'That's too short for you to read.' No one says, 'That's too easy for you, put it back.' No one says 'You couldn't read that if you tried
it's much too difficult.'
Yet if we take a peek into classrooms, libraries, and bookshops we will notice that children's choices are often mocked, censured, and denied as valid by idiotic, interfering teachers, librarians, and parents. Choice is a personal matter that changes with experience, changes with mood, and changes with need. We should let it be. — Mem Fox

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel. — John Irving