I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm a huge Groucho fan. There were some great comic minds that would transfer into any generation, and Groucho is certainly one of them.
We had been reading about these beatniks who hung out or lived in Greenwich Village, and we wanted to find out what a 'beatnik' was, and so a friend and I went right to the source. What we learned, of course, was that beatniks were mostly artists.
Allen Ginsberg is a tremendous warrior as time goes by. He's a warrior first and a poet second.
Dwayne McDuffie was one of my favorite writers. When I was growing up, he was one of the few African Americans working in American comics.
Alan Ginsberg was fabulous. The man is so filled with energy. He's 65 years old and he's just loaded with energy and charm and wit and his mind is constantly racing.
Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book. And I certainly would never read anything written by Kevin Smith.
Every city you go to has television and radio talk shows that are dying to give young comics a showcase. They all want to be able to say that so-and-so started here, got his first break on this show.
I was a Charles Schulz kind of guy. I didn't read comics books. The Warner Bros. guys were great - Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng.
I grew up on Jerry Lewis and Abbot and Costello, the Marx Brothers.
I'm very much influenced by your traditional comic book artists like Jack Kirby, Alex Toth and Walter Simonson. Their styles were sort of what I was gravitating towards.