Artists From The United States

"For some reason the creation was called a rhedosaurus, and although I can't remember where this name came from, I suspect Hal Chester or one of the writers coined it. Over the years, people have suggested that the first two letters relate to the initials of a certain animator. I have no comment."

"The task of instilling pathos into a creature that was, after all, an innocent victim of circumstances was something I had set myself from the outset, although I was restrained by the script... The Beast is a poor lost soul brought back to life by man and then destroyed by man. If it sounds familiar, it is. King Kong was a huge influence, as he would be in all the other creatures I would be father to."

"We don't deliberately desire to scare anybody - we design our creatures to fit in harmony with the story and, of course, our forte is the grotesque. That's why our films were classified so many times as horror films, which they weren't. I would call a war film a horror film because in those you see guts split and people being slaughtered, but our films deal with fantasy and are more theatrical than realistic."

"The most popular exhibits in any natural history museum are, without doubt, the dinosaurs. These creatures' popularity grows each year, partly because of the recent resurgence of dinosaur movies, but also because a skeleton of a full-sized tyrannosaurus rex still has the ability, even 65 million years after its death, to chill us to the bone."

"[The skeleton] in Seventh Voyage of Sinbad was more frightening than the seven in Jason and the Argonauts. [...] Because we had seven skeletons I thought we were going to get seven "X" certificates but we got a "U" instantly. But one skeleton on its own is possibly more frightening than seven, and also in Seventh Voyage the skeleton was in a dark, spooky chamber, while in Jason the seven were out in the open on a sunny hilltop."

"We don't set out to deliberately scare with our creatures, we try to make them as awe-inspiring as possible."

"The art of motion has always intrigued me. How a body - when it throws its weight from side to side and sits down - actually sits down. What muscles interact to bring that simple movement to its conclusion. Movement is a fascinating process and each creature I have made and animated has had its own character according to its physiognomy."

"I enjoyed Young Frankenstein. I didn't think I would because I like my Frankensteins pure and clean like the original but I was very amused by Young Frankenstein - I thought it was very well-done. On the whole I dislike tongue-in-cheek sendups. But I'm sure I wouldn't enjoy Flesh for Frankenstein. From what I've heard about it the film approaches the subject from the gorier side and neglects the profundity of the original."

"I suppose we would be monsters to a Venusian. [...] We depicted the outer space creature as something strange rather than as a monster. He was from a strange place and therefore out of place in our familiar surroundings."

"I teethed on Frankenstein and Dracula but I feel that those films were made with greater taste than horror films are made today. They dwell too much on the gorier aspects of their subjects for some reason. I suppose it's because people are more jaded now."

"I am often asked if I would have liked to have been involved with Jurassic Park. The plain answer is no. Although excellent, it is not with all its dollars what I would have wished to do with my career. I was always a loner and worked best that way. Since the very beginning I fought and struggled under constant pressure to keep the design and final result within my hands. As time moved on this became more difficult, until I was forced to bow to the fact that my method of working, in the financial sense, was no longer practical. Model animation has been relegated to a reflection, or a starting point for creature computer effects that has reached a high few could have anticipated. However, for all the wonderful achievements of the computer, the process creates creatures that are too realistic and for me that makes them unreal because they have lost one vital element - a dream quality. Fantasy, for me, is realizing strange beings that are so removed from the 21st century. These beings would include not only dinosaurs, because no matter what the scientists say, we still don't know how dinosaurs looked or moved, but also creatures of the mind. Fantastical creatures where the unreal quality becomes even more vital. Stop-motion supplies the perfect breath of life for them, offering a look of pure fantasy because their movements are beyond anything we know."

"I remember once, in my garage studio whilst I was animating a dinosaur, that things were not going right. Gradually they got worse and worse, as they do in situations where you don't keep your temper, and in a fit of accumulated rage I threw a hammer at the floor. Unfortunately, it bounced and went through a huge plate glass painting I had been preparing to use in a miniature set and which I had spent weeks carefully painting. I almost cried with frustration, and there and then decided that if I wanted to make this my career, I would have to control my temper. I am not saying that I didn't lose my temper after that incident - I did - but I always tried to remember that plate glass painting. It was a timely and necessary lesson."

"::Oh, communism! That was a burning issue. It was an outrageous issue. To be termed a communist would damage your whole family, damage your whole world — your friends wouldn’t talk to you. I’m talking about other people — because I wouldn’t go near the stuff. Sure, I was against the reds. I became a witch hunter. My enemies were the commies — I called them commies. In fact, Granny Goodness was a commie, Doubleheader was a commie."

":I knew this much — that everybody voted Democrat down my way. If you were poor, you voted Democrat and if you were rich you voted Republican."

":::Anything radical was dangerous to me, as it was to the average American. Nobody knew where a thing like that would lead and we were always afraid of chaos. So communism became the doorway to chaos, and the doorway to chaos was the doorway to evil. Your family might be hurt. Your friends might be hurt. You didn’t want to see a thing like that."

":No, we didn’t do horror in the sense of haunted houses or people with masks the way you might see them today; something lurking in an anteroom. Our stories were more like peasants sitting around a fire. We had the “Strange World of Your Dreams”. Ours didn’t run to bloody horror. Ours ran to weirdness. We began to interpret dreams. Remember, Joe and I were wholesome characters. We weren’t guys that were bent on the weird and the bizarre. We were the kind of guys who wouldn’t offend our mother, who wouldn’t offend anyone in your family, and certainly not the reader. So we knew that we had to depart from adventure and that there were other ways to go and we came up with the “Strange World of Your Dreams”."

"The romance genre was all around us. There was love story pulps, and there was love story sections in the newspapers. There was love stories in the movies. Wherever you went there was love stories! That’s how we got our new material, and it suddenly struck me that that’s what we haven’t done. We haven’t done any romance stories!"

"I was a young man. I was still growing out of the East Side. The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it."

"::::I enjoyed working on any story. I’m essentially a storyteller. You name the subject, and I’ll give a good story on it."

"I don't classify gods as far as their power goes. I classify them as far as their personality goes. Each god, if he used his power right, could defeat another god. If I used my power right I could defeat anyone on Earth if I wanted to. As a man, if I used my physical strength at its best, I could overpower anybody I wanted to. If I did it right. It's the same way with the gods. If they used their super-powers right, they could defeat any other god. Darkseid is no different except that Darkseid is an evil guy with a lot of class. He's the kind of guy that might outthink you, and with super-powers involved it could be in a very dangerous and earthshaking way."

"Darkseid considers anything evil that's going to stop him. If you stop me, I consider you evil."

"I feel that nonviolence coupled with some kind of sustaining influence can work in comics. I don't feel that you have to show blood and gore and guts. I think it's repellent. I've seen enough of it in its reality, and it's just as repellent when it's drawn as in reality. I see nothing of any value in anything that has what you call shock value. I see nothing in that except using that sort of thing to prove a point. In other words if you're making an anti-war document or if you're trying to tell the truth about a certain subject, and the blood and gore was a part of that subject, I wouldn't omit it. If I were going to make an exposé on anything I would show anything connected with it. For instance, in a gangster movie I would show the results of being a gangster-the life activities as well as the end and death. I would show exactly how it is they ended. I would show the bullet holes because it's part of the picture, but I wouldn't exploit it for its value alone. I see no entertainment in that sort of thing."

"If someone took control of your mind and you were not able to think as yourself any longer, you would no longer be yourself. You'd be something in his command. You as an individual would be dead. That's Anti-Life. In other words, if you gave yourself to some cause, and gave up everything as an individual and you were at the beck and call of some leader, you would be dead as an individual. And that's what Darkseid wants. He wants control of everybody. If it was snowing outside and you weren't wearing any shoes and it was 38 degrees below zero and this guy says, "Go out and get me a bologna sandwich," you have to go through all that; you obey him automatically, you obey him meekly. You walk out without a coat and you freeze to death. He doesn't care. You do it anyway despite the fact that you don't want to do it. You're dead as an individual. You have no choice. You can't object and you have no stature as a person. You're dead. A slave is a dead man. That's what Darkseid wants. Darkseid wants complete subjugation of everything at a word - his word. He wants every thinking thing under his control. I believe it's an evil concept but he doesn't think so."

"The right idea to Darkseid is anything that benefits him. He isn't going to worry about you. He sees the world from where he sits, and of course what he sees is big. He's a big man. Darkseid is a tremendous, powerful, evil figure, and he's going to see everything in a cosmic view. He's not going to see a view of the candy store around the corner or what's playing at the Palladium next week. Darkseid is going to see everything in an over-powering cosmic view, and of course what else would he want but complete subjugation of everything? Earth is included in that everything, and my concept is that somewhere on Earth is someone who can solve the Anti-Life Equation, and Darkseid is after that poor soul."

"I wasn't the kind of student that Pratt was looking for. They wanted people who would work on something forever. I didn't want to work on any project forever. I intended to get things done."

"I always enjoyed doing monster books. Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary. Monster books were a challenge — what kind of monster would fascinate people? I couldn’t draw anything that was too outlandish or too horrible. I never did that. What I did draw was something intriguing. There was something about this monster that you could live with. If you saw him you wouldn’t faint dead away. There was nothing disgusting in his demeanor. There was nothing about him that repelled you. My monsters were lovable monsters."

"I feel that story, first. I know those people, first. When I put them down they've already lived."

":To make the [reader] happy was not my objective, but to make the [reader] say, “Yeah, that’s what would happen” — that was my objective. I knew the [reader] was never happy all the time. You take the Thing, he’d knock out 50 guys at a time and win — then maybe he’d sit down and kind of reflect on it: “Maybe I hurt somebody or maybe we could have done it some other way” like a human being would think, not like a monster. In other books the guy would knock out the gangs and that would be the end of it. You would see the guys in jail, and that’s it. Or it would say, “Wait until next week.”"

"Darkseid is very evil. He's the equivalent of a mass murderer, but he wouldn't waste his super-powers on just one individual. He wouldn't go out of his way just to kill one man; it would be ridiculous. He wouldn't do it. He'd just walk away. That's how my villains think."

"::The artist is the lowest form of life on the rung of the ladder. The publishers are usually businessmen who deal with businessmen. They deal with promotional people. They deal with financial people. They deal with accountants. They deal with people who work on higher levels. They deal with tax people, but have absolutely no interest in artists, in individual artists, especially very young artists."

":::I know all about Thor and Balder and Mjolnir, the hammer. Nobody ever bothered with that stuff except me. I loved it in high school and I loved it in my pre-high school days. It was the thing that kept my mind off the general poverty in the area. When I went to school that’s what kept me in school — it wasn’t mathematics and it wasn’t geography; it was history."

"Even when he was given someone else's idea, he would build it into something unbelievable and new, like a man who was asked to repair a vacuum cleaner but instead built it into a functioning jet pack."

"Unlike other comic book creators who were given either stateside or way-behind-lines assignments, and perhaps because Kirby understood Yiddish, the Jewish German dialect spoken by his family, he was sent as a scout behind enemy lines to draw maps. He endured and survived many harrowing violent experiences during his service, almost losing his feet to trench foot. He had no time for fascists or racists."

"Jack didn’t have the resources or the stomach lining to fight Marvel over copyrights, character ownership or past contractual sleights that he believed he suffered."

"…I don’t think there was one state that wasn’t represented there. The experience helped me appreciate the variety of the country, in the people, the language, and culture. It is incredible to think that we are as diverse as we are and how we have held together as one culture. Really, it is the one clear fact of this country that makes it unique to the world."

"His real dream was to make movies."

"Jack Kirby’s massive contributions to comics are common knowledge. His influential pulp-epic motifs. The revolutionary dynamism of his art. But here I’d like to talk about a more specific set of “King” Kirby’s innovations—his use of “minority” protagonists. Whether stressing the multi-ethnic makeup of America or revising racist preconceptions of Africa, Kirby’s work challenged comics’ unremarked upon WASPiness and white supremacy in quiet and not-so-quiet ways."

"Superheroes may be superhuman in stature but inside they’re human beings and they act and react as human beings. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing legendary characters like Hercules or modern characters, you’ll find that humans are humans and they’ll react the same way in certain situations."

"I never do fairy tale people, I do people just as they are."

"If somebody wants to kill you, they make you a scout."

"::::The Hulk I created when I saw a woman lift a car. Her baby was caught under the running board of this car. The little child was playing in the gutter and he was crawling from the gutter onto the sidewalk under the running board of this car — he was playing in the gutter. His mother was horrified. She looked from the rear window of the car, and this woman in desperation lifted the rear end of the car."

"Before setting off for duty, the auteur cranked out an increased flow of comics, stating that he wanted “to get enough work backlogged that I could go into the Army, kill Hitler, and get back before the readers missed us.""

"Darkseid constitutes the kind of men Kirby was acquainted with in his youth. The slum lords, made famous in Will Eisner’s A Contract With God, were men (perhaps women?) with agendas. They operated on morals dictated by their business mindset. The cost of rent, the living conditions, and the quality of life they allowed for their tenants was in line with their standards. To them, that standard was appropriate. To call them “evil” or “unethical” is an inaccurate assessment. They were gods within the worlds they created."

"He created a new grammar of storytelling and a cinematic style of motion. Once-wooden characters cascaded from one frame to another—or even from page to page—threatening to fall right out of the book into the reader's lap. The force of punches thrown was visibly and explosively evident. Even at rest, a Kirby character pulsed with tension and energy in a way that makes movie versions of the same characters seem static by comparison. The frenetic action and the rooftop fighting so common on the superhero set did not just materialize out of nowhere. Mr. Kirby remembered much of it from his Depression-era youth on New York’s Lower East Side, where, he once told an interviewer, the incessant fights among rival gangs were often staged up and down fire escapes and during running battles across tenement rooftops."

"…Jack took a call. A voice on the other end said, ‘There are three of us down here in the lobby. We want to see the guy who does this disgusting comic book and show him what real Nazis would do to his Captain America’. To the horror of others in the office, Kirby rolled up his sleeves and headed downstairs. The callers, however, were gone by the time he arrived."

"There were mostly women and some men; they looked like they hadn’t eaten for I don’t know how long. They were scrawny. Their clothes were all tattered and dirty. The Germans didn’t give a shit for anything. They just left the place; just like leaving a dog behind to starve. I was standing there for a long time just watching thinking to myself, ‘What do I do?’ Just thinking about it makes my stomach turn. All I could say was, ‘Oh, God.’"

"I loved Jack's work and the first time I saw it I couldn't believe what I was seeing. He asked if we could do some freelance work together. I was delighted and I took him over to my little office. We worked from the second issue of Blue Bolt through ... about 25 years."

"Jack Kirby—co-creator of the Marvel Universe and big chunks of DC’s—remains one of the most influential writer/artists in the history of comics. Many of Kirby’s works involve the fight against fascism, embodied in characters such as Doctor Doom and the Red Skull. This wasn’t just an imaginary battle for Kirby, who killed Nazis in World War II and was ready to throw down with any fascists he encountered stateside. Many people have fought for freedom in the military; many others have done it through art. Few have waged the war for freedom on two fronts quite like Kirby."

"My favorite thing about Kirby’s artwork was his storytelling. He was really a film director doing comics."

"Jack’s aliens did not look like anyone else’s aliens. They were dangerous with “alieness.” His characters in general, alien or human, posed with drama. There was something alive, almost sinister, about the locations he drew, whether it was the swamp where the alien craft first landed, or the boarding house where the chase finally ended. Even the coloring was strange, full of raw hues and knockouts where one color was washed over most of a panel, like a raw spotlight shining on the scene. Most of all, the work was vital, bursting with energy even in those panels where characters were merely standing around. And if they were in motion, they moved with authority. It was like no other comic book I had ever seen. In microcosm, that was the genius of Jack Kirby. He was like no other artist who worked in comics, a uniquely gifted individual who brought a new sensibility and a fire to the art and storytelling of American comic books, a fire that burns to this day. I’m happy to say I’m still learning from him."