Gilbert Hernandez Quotes

I don't feel so sad when somebody dies, Julio, because they fly away to explore the stars and planets. When it's our turn we join them in exploring the universe.

For me, the reason to make the movie is that if people like the comic, then people would like the movie if it was well made. There are good movies for them, but very few. And I mean that in a true sense. If they love your story for freaking 30 years, then they can do a movie about it.

I had always shown childhood as something difficult, something you want to get the hell out of, but now I wanted to do a story that was the opposite, about that moment in time when you're in that world of discovery, doing what you want to do. That fleeting moment when you're in your zone.

My two biggest influences are Archie comics and Dennis the Menace.

I've sort of dealt with the characters' lives more; particularly the women characters.

I think I related more literally to the early 'Spider-Man' comics from Steve Ditko because it could be upfront and direct about the problems of being a kid. He captured being a teenager so beautifully.

I've dealt with Hollywood about having my work made into a film or cartoon but nothing came of it. That's not to say I wouldn't like to see something happen.

I always felt I was living in two worlds. One was the Mexican world, because nearly everybody I knew, relatives and cousins and kids in the neighbourhood, were Mexican. Then school was a different world. It was ethnically mixed.

It wasn't until school that we realised that we were abnormal.

We thought everybody read comics. We didn't know we were weird. We didn't know people that collected comics were strange. It was as normal as listening to rock music on the radio.

We were very happy when a South African court, which had previously ruled against us, took another look and decided that this material was not obscene and allowed it into the country.

Our father died when we were very young, so our mother raised six kids. We saw the world filtered through her eyes, being a minority woman raising six kids.

I happen to think Latinas, Latin women, are the most beautiful women in the world. So that's what I'm going to draw. I love women from all cultures, of course, but if I was going to deal with any of them, that would be No. 1 for me.

I felt like challenging myself and challenging my readers with something darker and heavier. I don't know how to explain it, because I'm not a political person. I have two political stories, and that's it: 'Human Diastrophism' and 'Poison River.'

I wanted to do pretty much a purely boy story, yes. The girls are kind of the bad guys in 'Marble Season', although that wasn't my intention. It's also a world without adults.