Jeff Lemire Quotes

Have you read this, Tim? It's my favorite book. Trinket Tocket and his Tin Rocket!'
'I am not familiar with it, Andy. But I can easily access the data network and download all the volumes if you'd like?'
'Nah. My mom still gets them for me in hard copy. I love reading them like this. The drawings look better.

One of my favorite things about the DC Universe, growing up as a reader, was just how big it was and just how many characters and superheroes there were. And how many odd characters there were.

I'm never one to care too much if my work becomes adapted; I make comic books.

I think when science fiction is at its worst, it's just spaceships flying around shooting at each other. There has to be a lot more going on than that ... science fiction is about exploring new worlds and new ideas, not about ray guns and action, necessarily.

I've found I sometimes have the best success working on characters I didn't really connect to right away.

There's only two ways to be completely alone in this world, lost in a crowd or in total isolation ...

Why not take a science fiction comic and put the characters in a small town to gain their particular perspective? A lot of that comes from me growing up in a small town on a farm, so that's what I know and what I'm comfortable with. My drawing style is also very sparse and minimalist, so a rural setting complements that.

I can handle a lot of work. I've always been able to. I'm a very focused individual. I come to my studio at about 7:30 in the morning and exit almost 5:00 P.M. In that time, those eight or nine hours, it's kind of laser focus on whatever I'm working on. There aren't really any distractions or anything.

I never thought I would work in mainstream superhero comics or Valiant or Marvel. I just set out to make the kinds of stories I wanted to make, which at the beginning was small personal stuff like 'Essex County.'

For some reason, I have always had a really good ability to write children in a way that's realistic but not annoying. The key to that is underwriting them: peel back the dialogue and keep it simple.

I look at my son and his relationship to technology, and I think back to when I was six and how wildly different the world is in that regard. I see him using an iPhone and all this stuff, and then I think back to when I was six. We didn't even have computers in our houses at all yet. This is a huge gap between our experiences as children.

I started in comics in 2005, ten years ago, and at that time, I didn't have a cell phone. I don't even think I had a computer myself, you know. And just in those ten years, how much technology has changed.

I write and draw from the gut. I often don't know what my stories are about until they're done.

They say the city gets in your blood, but that's crap. The city doesn't become part of you... you become part of it. It soaks you up bit by bit, year after year. Until you're just a tiny part of its system... Pumping through its veins, lost in its arteries.

When you're a kid, you're not as corrupted by the world at large. You're not corrupted by prejudices. You're much more open-minded. Much more interested in the world around you. 'Sweet Tooth' is about the world returning to that kind of place.

When I approached 'Animal Man,' I approached it as if it wasn't a reboot, as if the Grant Morrison and Jamie Delano stuff happened. I mean, as much as I could make it all make sense, it still all happened.

I feel like there are comic book artists who are comic book artists, and then there's comic book artists who are cartoonists.

People say you can always count on family. But I think that's a lie. I'm starting to think that the only one we can really count on is ourselves. Maybe in the end, we're all on our own.

Sony is looking at 'Descender' as a franchise of films rather than just one movie.

I know a lot of people who read 'Sweet Tooth' are the kind of people who don't read a lot of other comics. Whatever it was, I'm just glad it happened.

I feel like if you really know the ending right from the beginning, you can add so many subtleties and little things later that will pay off and be more consistent and more rewarding for the reader.

I grew up reading a lot of superhero comics, so it's really fun to take a shot at one myself and see what happens.

I don't play video games because I know that if I ever started, I'd never be able to maintain a career again.

I've always enjoyed teen characters, and kids as well. For whatever reason, I seem to have an ability to do it sort of well, and I enjoy doing it.

A lot of cinematic influences on 'Descender' - Kubrick for sure. '2001: A Space Odyssey' is my favorite movie. It has been since I was 12. I just love that film.

In general, I feel so much of pop culture is set in the generic big city, particularly comics. I feel like there are so many other stories to tell.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

I don't enjoy putting my characters through hell unless there's a reason. I don't use violence or anything just for shock value. They're always a means to an end.

There's something so arrogant about us creating robots that are more and more human-looking or acting. It's like we're playing God. Let's create something that's a reflection of us, but it's inferior.

When I write Superboy and other DC characters, it's about boiling them down to core concepts.

The waves are high and the sunset's red.
So now it's time to go to bed.
The tide is up and the wind does rip.
But this old ship'll never tip.
We're far at sea, days from land.
But if you're scared just take my hand.
Just hold on tight Boy-o-mine.
In my arms you'll be just fine.
The moon is full and the sea is deep.
And we rock and rock and rock to sleep.

Truth is, I've been scared to leave this place. Scared of what I'd find if I did. Or maybe I was scared of what I wouldn't find. Should have just took off and never looked back.

But before you can become something new, you must remember who you have already been...

Everyone finds my work super sad. I never do. I always find it uplifting in a weird way.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

I have a lot of great fans. A lot of fans have cosplayed as Sweet Tooth, which I thought was really cool.

'Plutona' is the story of five kids who find the body of the world's greatest superhero in the woods after school one day. It's about how this discovery, and the decisions they make, affect them as a group and individually.

It's my job to write the best book I can each month and hand my scripts in. Everything else is beyond my control.

The Green Arrow stuff that I've responded to from the past is the Mike Grell stuff. I've liked a lot of other stuff, but I think for me, the direction and the mood and the tone that I really want is something much darker and more aggressive and really fast-paced action.

'Animal Man' and 'Swamp Thing' have so many commonalities in tone and mood.

The scrape of the skates on the ice. The smell of musty old equipment. The black puck stains on the boards. To the uninitiated they're nothing, but to a hockey player they're home.

It's not hard to look at our own world and draw parallels between 9/11, for example, and how Muslims are viewed or treated by North American culture since then. Just to see the way fear can breed hatred and intolerance for people who aren't the same as us - and that's certainly part of what's at the heart of 'Descender.'

I started off doing indie comics that I wrote and drew myself. I was doing those for ten years before I started to work for DC. The first book that I wrote for DC was for another artist. I did some backups in 'Adventure Comics' years ago starring The Atom. That's the first time that I ever wrote for another artist.

When I was offered 'Hawkeye,' it was very intimidating at first because that book is so loved and so successful, commercially and critically. The worst thing you could do is try to imitate what they did because, in the end, you're just going to get a watered-down version of what they did.

If I'm not invested emotionally, the artwork doesn't feel emotional.

The thing about Canada is that it's a very large country, and the population's very spread out among different regions. Each region in the country really has its own personality and its own culture, you know? From West Coast to East Coast - wherever you go, it's almost like it's its own country.

And this is the result. Millions of small sins, billions of tiny evils--twisting, twining, groping, consuming...Till they become a great serpent...a blight on humanity...that rises from the collective unconscious towering over the world...Blocking out the light. It is so convenient to blame it all on some sneering, arrogant Satan--sitting on a fiery throne, plotting to corrupt our souls. But if there is a devil--he's just another projection of our own sins.

Art should walk a tightrope. That's what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can't be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?

Letting a project sit and coming back to it is just as important as working on it all the time. You need to come back to it with fresh eyes.

In the case of 'Sweet Tooth,' and in the case of a lot of stuff I do, it all starts with the image. It may be something I sketch in my sketchbooks - something that reoccurs in the sketchbooks. Eventually, a character or story line starts to grow out of that.

People like Superman, The Flash - they just feel limited in who they are and what you can do with them because everyone knows who they are and what they do. Someone like Animal Man feels very open to interpretation.

It's hard to look back on your life and point to one event–one moment–that changed everything and set you on the path that made you…you. That only happens in movies. Most people's lives are a series of millions of messy little moments strung together adding up to a messy little life. But sometimes, you can look back and see a pattern forming… see a clear path cutting through the mess.
It makes you wonder, do we even have a choice at all? Or was that path going to form no matter what we did?
Yeah, it's easy to look back and see the pattern. It's easy to second-guess every decision you made and figure out what you would've done differently. But none of that much matters now. It's all in the past. Can't waste time thinking about who i was, who i could've been. All that matters now is who i am.

I've been reading comics since I was four. I used to get them when I would go grocery shopping with my mom. I remember getting the digest versions of old DC comics. The one that I remember reading first was Paul Levitz' 'Justice Society of America' stuff that he was doing in the '70s.

We want to take our time with 'Descender' and let the story unfold at its own pace. But we have carefully planned each world and worked to give each its own look and feel. And each of the 9 core worlds will play a role in the series.

There is definitely a thematic lineage between 'Descender' and my previous work, like 'Sweet Tooth' and 'Trillium.'

I think America's obsession with guns and with violence in media and society is a horrible sickness.

I never - when I go into a project, I don't think too much about if there's a lot of other sci-fi books out there or horror books or whatever. I just tell the stories I want to tell, and I think that is evident on the page.

If you read the whole Vertigo 'Animal Man' series of 89 issues or whatever, each writer has a completely different take on his origin. If you try to put them all together, they contradict one another. I had to pick and choose to make up a new origin that makes sense to new readers.