Melvyn Bragg TV - Rude Britannia TV - The Young Ones TV - Elayne Boosler - Tintin’s Adventure With Frank Gardner TV - The Adventures of Tintin 2011 - Edward W Said - Becky Cloonan - Will Eisner - Douglas Wolk - Samuel R Delany - Grant Morrison - Eddie Campbell - Bill Watterson - George Carlin - Crumb 1994 -
At its peak Viz sold in excess of a million copies an issue. Melvyn Bragg on Class & Culture III, BBC 2012
Cartoonist Gerald Scarfe drew the prime minister naked ... Private Eye’s Romantic England: Macmillan Issue. Rude Britannia 3/3: You’ve Never Had It So Rude, BBC 2010
A counter-culture: house-journal of this underground movement was Oz which first surfaced in the Summer of Love 1967. ibid.
Inside School Kid’s Issue: Oz was a comic strip featuring the head of the much loved children’s character Rupert Bear superimposed on an X-rated cartoon by American Robert Crumb. Words and pictures were a rude provocation. ibid.
The Oz Three ... were found guilty and sent down with harsh sentences ... A successful appeal. ibid.
Viz from Newcastle. ibid.
Anger made Bell’s pen drip with vitriol. ibid.
This comic is a reactionary militarist pamphlet. All they do is fight all the time. The Young Ones: Flood ***** BBC 1982
I’ve thought for the last decade or so, the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment, pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages, and had the ability to make it all funny, entertaining, and pertinent. Elayne Boosler
Tintin is the world’s most successful comic-book character. TinTin’s Adventure With Frank Gardner, BBC 2011
Tintin’s first ever adventure is a surprising political story. And I’ll be following Tintin’s route to the land of the Soviets. ibid.
Always travelling, always on the move, always in the middle of some adventure. ibid.
Herge loved to make his cartoons feel real. ibid.
Tintin’s first adventure – In the Land of the Soviets. ibid.
Originally published in weekly instalments in the Belgium newspaper Le Petit Vingtieme, the comic strip was a huge success from the outset. ibid.
Ultimately, Tintin and his dog Snowy are successful in uncovering the supposed secrets of the Bolsheviks – and how they are stealing the food of the Soviet people, rigging elections and murdering opponents. ibid.
Herge was entirely self-taught as an artist. ibid.
Tintin was actually commissioned by Herge’s boss Wallez. Wallez was not only a newspaper editor, he was also a Catholic priest and a fascist. ibid.
Tintin’s first adventure appeared in 1929. ibid.
Professor Calculus, the eccentric professor; the Thomson Twins, Herge’s hapless detectives; and of course Captain Haddock. ibid.
Tintin’s opposition to the Bolsheviks makes him Public Enemy Number One and he quickly finds himself in jail. ibid.
I’m a reporter. The Adventures of Tintin 2011 starring Jamie Bell & Andy Serkis & Daniel Craig & Nick Frost & Simon Pegg & Daniel Mays & Mackenzie Crook & Toby Jones & Gad Elmaleh et al, director Steven Spielberg
I’m looking for answers. ibid.
Leave it to the professionals. ibid. Thompson Twins
You hit a wall. You push through it. ibid. Haddock
That’s the location of the treasure. ibid.
I don’t remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result. Edward W Said, Palestine
The world of [comic book] collecting is not a pretty place. For a bunch of guys who like good-over-evil stories, you sure meet a lot of morally bankrupt assholes. Seth, Wimbledon Green
Comics are hard work. Comics are relentless. Comics will break your heart. Comics are monetarily unsatisfying. Comics don’t offer much in terms of fortune and glory, but comics will give you complete freedom to tell the stories you want to tell, in ways unlike any other medium. Comics will pick you up after it knocks you down. Comics will dust you off and tell you it loves you. And you will look into its eyes and know it’s true, that you love comics back. Becky Cloonan
In all forms of comics the sequential artist relies upon the tacit cooperation of the reader. This cooperation is based upon the convention of reading and the common cognitive disciplines. Indeed, it is this very voluntary cooperation, so unique to comics, that underlies the contract between artist and audience. Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art
A lot of the people who read comics think of comics as a culture – or as a subculture; something with its own private codes that mark its members as belonging, and everybody else as not belonging. Douglas Wolk, Graphic Language
The viewer has the greatest control over the comic book gaze, greater than any of the other two. Viewers can control how far way or close to hold the page, whether to go backwards and re-gaze – and going back in a comic book is a very different process from going back in a novel to re-read a previous paragraph or chapter. Samuel R Delany, The Comics Journal 48
The comics’ medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest common denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let’s see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let’s make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let’s make artefacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that’s what it is. Grant Morrison, interview Pop Image
The form restricts itself at every turn. For instance, the artist sits before his blank page. If his first picture is a big square one all the way across then he has severely limited his second panel to having to fit in the letterbox space along the bottom. If he divides that in two then that third panel is looking like a sad and defeated cornered animal. That’s about all I see when I look at comic books now. Obviously the artist doesn't do it that way; he plans the whole page simultaneously. But it tends to read like he planned it that way, and that’s all that counts. Eddie Campbell, interview Tom Spurgeon 2006
True, comics are a popular art, and yes, I believe their primary obligation is to entertain, but comics can go beyond that, and when they do, they move from silliness to significance. Bill Watterson
If cartoonists would look at this more as an art than as a part time job or a get-rich-quick scheme, I think comics overall would be better. I think there’s a tremendous potential to be tapped. Bill Watterson
Comics are capable of being anything the mind can imagine. I consider it a great privilege to be a cartoonist. I love my work, and I am grateful for the incredible forum I have to express my thoughts. People give me their attention for a few seconds every day, and I take that as an honor and a responsibility. I try to give readers the best strip I’m capable of doing. Bill Watterson
Amazingly, much of the best cartoon work was done early on in the medium’s history. The early cartoonists, with no path before them, produced work of such sophistication, wit, and beauty that it increasingly seems to me that cartoon evolution is working backward. Comic strips are moving toward a primordial goo rather than away from it ... Not only can comics be more than we’re getting today, but the comics already have been more than we're getting today. Bill Watterson
In comic strips, the person on the right always speaks first. George Carlin