I don't think it's a coincidence that comic books appeal so strongly to children. Not that it negates any of their power for adults, but there is something about comics that makes them a perfect storytelling system for children.
I came to the big city and I started to get involved in the punk scene and stuff, and I wanted to sort of brand myself. I made a pretty conscious effort to be a different type of person.
When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.
I've certainly seen a lot of my cartoonist friends embrace 'Little Lulu' in a much deeper way because their kids love it so much. But that's not gonna be happening for me. There are no kids coming.
As I get older and I see all my friends starting to have children, I see them have different reactions to the material that was probably not of great interest to them when they were younger, because they're re-experiencing it through their kids.
For me, the very last great strip is 'Peanuts.' After 'Peanuts,' there are a very few strips that I enjoyed for different reasons, but I don't think they were great. I don't think anything's come along since Charles Schulz - and I mean since 1950 - that I think rises above the professional or the eccentric into that realm of greatness.
Comics are given serious attention now and I'm quite surprised. You see them reviewed in major newspapers and exhibited in serious museums. I wouldn't have predicted it.
I think obviously there's a core of who you are, and as you get older, you become more aware of what behavior is immutable. For a long time, I felt there was a deep separation between the person I was as a teenager and the person I was in my 20s and early 30s .
You look at most artists, the arc of their career, there's a definite decline at the end. And that decline could set in at any time. In your 50s, or your 60s and 70s if you're lucky. Time goes by fast, and you've got to be busy all the time.
There is no other way to change your physical reality but by changing your thoughts.Collection: Reality
Your impulses are your closest communication with your inner self, because in the waking state they are the spontaneous urgings toward action, rising from that deep inner knowledge of yourself that you have in dreams.Collection: Dream
When you see the world as it is, but insist on making it more like it could be, you matter.Collection: Greatness
The past existed in multitudinous ways. You only experienced one probable past. By changing this past in your mind, now, in your present, you can change not only its nature but its effect, and not only upon yourself but upon others.Collection: Past
Do not place the words of ANYONE above the feelings of your own being. You can learn much from others, but the deepest knowledge must come from within yourself.Collection: Feelings
We believe what we want to believe, and once we believe something, it becomes a self-fulfilling truth.Collection: Believe
If you want to know what you think of yourself, then ask yourself what you think of others and you will find the answer.Collection: Spiritual
To act in an independent manner, you must begin to initiate action that you want to occur physically by creating it in your own being. This is done by combining belief, emotion and imagination, and forming them into a mental picture of the desired physical result.Collection: Independent
The art of moving forward lies in understanding what to leave behind.Collection: Art
Consciousness is, among other things, a spontaneous exercise in creativity. You are learning now, in a three-dimensional context, the ways in which your emotional and psychic existence can create varieties of physical form. You manipulate within the psychic environment, and these manipulations are then automatically impressed upon the physical mold.Collection: Creativity
You must watch the pictures that you paint with your imagination. Your environment and the conditions of your life at any given time are the direct result of your own inner expectations. If you imagine dire circumstances, ill health or desperate loneliness, these will be 'automatically' materialized, for these thoughts themselves bring about the conditions that will give them a reality in physical terms. If you would have good health then you must imagine this as vividly as you fearfully imagine ill health.Collection: Loneliness
Realize that your physical experience and environment is the materialization of your beliefs. If you find great exuberance, health, effective work, abundance, smiles on the faces of those who you meet, then take it for granted that your beliefs are beneficial. If you see a world that is good, people like you, take it for granted again, that your beliefs are beneficial. But if you find poor health, a lack of meaningful work, a lack of abundance, a world of sorrow and evil, then assume your beliefs are faulty and begin examining them.Collection: Meaningful
When your ideas about yourself change, so does your experience.Collection: Ideas
We see what we believe, not the other way around.Collection: Believe
When you do not know what to do, relax and tell yourself that other portions of yourself do know; they will take over. Give yourself some rest. Remind yourself that in many ways you are a very successful person as you are. Success does not necessarily involve great intellect or great position or great wealth; it has to do with inner integrity. Remember that.Collection: Integrity
The true power is in the imagination which dares to speculate upon that which is not yet. The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probabilities.Collection: Reality
My life is mine and I form it. Tell yourself this often. Create your own life now, using your beliefs as an artist uses color.Collection: Artist
A generation that hates war will not bring peace. A generation that loves peace will bring peace.Collection: Peace
You are meant to judge physical reality. You are meant to realize that it is a materialization of your thoughts and feelings and images, that the inner self forms that world. In your terms, you cannot be allowed to go into other dimensions until you have learned the great power of your thoughts and subjective feelings.Collection: Reality
You create your own reality. There is no other rule.Collection: Reality
My mother-in-law is obsessed with clowns.Collection: Mother
Hope without a strategy doesn’t generate leadership. Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there. People won’t follow you if they don’t believe you can get to where you say you’re going.Collection: Believe
Don't worry about your stuff. Worry about making meaning instead.Collection: Life
Wouldn't it be great to be gifted? In fact It turns out that choices lead to habits. Habits become talents. Talents are labeled gifts. You're not born this way, you get this way.Collection: Choices
Don’t try to change someone’s worldview is the strategy smart marketers follow. Don’t try to use facts to prove your case and to insist that people change their biases. You don’t have enough time and you don’t have enough money. Instead, identify a population with a certain worldview, frame your story in terms of that worldview and you win.Collection: Smart
The best way to honor someone who has said something smart and useful is to say something back that is smart and useful. The other way to honor them is to go do something with what you learned.Collection: Smart
We've been trained to prefer being right to learning something, to prefer passing the test to making a difference, and most of all to prefer fitting in with the right peopleCollection: Differences
Don’t try to make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody.Collection: Trying
If you accept that human beings are difficult to change, and embrace (rather than curse) the uniqueness that everyone brings to the table, you’ll navigate the world with more bliss and effectiveness. And make better decisions, too.Collection: Effectiveness
Marketing is about spreading ideas, and spreading ideas is the single most important output of our civilization.Collection: Civilization
The miracle of your being cannot escape itself. Your thoughts blossom into events. Your beliefs grow as surely in time and space as flowers do.Collection: Flower
It's not enough to be aware of the domain you're working in, you need to understand it. Noticing things and being curious about how they work is the single most common trait I see in creative people. Once you can break the components down, you can put them back together into something brand new.Collection: People
Anyone who takes responsibility for getting something done is welcome to ask for the authority to do it.Collection: Responsibility
We happily give up our freedom and our income in exchange for having someone else take responsibility for telling us what to do next.Collection: Giving Up
If you'd rather be a chooser, enter a market or a transaction where you have something to trade, something of value, something to offer that's difficult to get everywhere else. If all you have is the desire to get picked, that's not sufficient.Collection: Desire
As far as you are concerned the present is your point of action, focus and power, and from that point of volition you form both your future and past. Realizing this, you will understand that you are not at the mercy of a past over which you have no control.Collection: Past