Scott McCloud

“When you're free of editorial control, you owe it to yourself to obtain feedback from friends and readers. Some take those criticisms to heart and incorporate it into their work, and some ignore them.”

“I've always been very forward-looking, and it was actually kind of difficult to turn my gaze backwards to look at comics history.”

“It wasn't until I discovered comics that I actually began to approach drawing as a possible career.”

“All through my comics career, I was always trying to reinvent the form.”

“I had a lot of ideas on how comics worked and pretty early on I had this idea that it would be fun to explain them in comics form.”

“If you think about it, for any kind of content on the web, the natural price per unit of these things should be under a dollar.”

“Today, comics is one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard.”

“And what better way to reinvent the form than to toss virtually 99% of everything that's been done with it and start with a brand-new canvas, reinvent it from the ground up? Digital comics gave me the opportunity to do that, and producing things digitally gave me the opportunity to do that.”

“If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.”

“My first influences were superhero artists.”

“I don't think the potential for comics in nonfiction has been exploited nearly as much as it could be.”

“It would take a lifetime to read all the webcomics published in one year.”

“If a comic comes out on the scene and it's really knock-out brilliant, the community is pretty good about getting the word about good newcomers.”

“Learn from everyone. Follow no one. Watch for patterns. Work like hell.”

“Webcomics are much bigger than any one scene can circumscribe.”

“Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.”

“My dad was an inventor, and I think I've always had a rosy view of technology, or at least its potential.”

“The notion of getting under the hood and explaining how something works, that's fairly familiar territory to me.”

“There's a very big part of me that just wants to take all of comics history and toss it on the bonfire. I'd sort of like to get on to the future.”

“My dad was an engineer and so I had this picture of science and technology and pursuits of the mind as being more impressive than artistic pursuits, which I saw a as kind of frivolous.”