I think the thinking is, in the comic books, I should pack as much onto a page as possible, because, you know, it's kind of the cheaper format, and you want to give readers as much as you can for their dollar.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think a 23-page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big investment for an artist. So unless you've got someone who wants to pay you while you're doing it or up front, it's kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you're the artist yourself.
When I was coming up, I kept a ton of comic books, almost 300 comic books. Back in the day, they didn't used to cost that much, so I used to keep 'em, collect 'em, trade 'em.
We probably put about four or five comic books out a year and probably about two or three art books and various trade paperbacks - maybe four or five of those a year - and that's what we do now.
I have 15,000 comics in a warehouse, all bagged individually.
I've always liked the tradition of publishing work serially in the comic-book 'pamphlet' format and then collecting that work in book form, so I've just stuck with it.
I think too many comic book covers are way too busy, crammed with far too much information, both visual and verbal, that just becomes a dull noise.
All of the stuff I can't afford to do on a TV budget, I just put into the comic book because you're really only limited in a comic by your artist's imagination.
With comics, you don't have to worry so much about budgetary constraints. In film and television, however fanciful you want to be, someone can come up to you and go, 'Okay, this is going to cost X amount of dollars, and we only have so many days to film this.' With graphic novels, you can have that alien invasion you've always wanted to see.
That was the appealing thing about comics: There literally is no budget in comics. You're only limited by your imagination.
Comics are printed on paper, which is expensive, making it tough to stay in business.