- I have never, to the best of my recollection, longed for the good old days of my childhood or youth. They weren't that good, and neither were the years of the Golden Age of Comic Books. That period - the late '30s and early '40s - may seem gloriously simple and primitive to people today, but it wasn't. The world was just as complicated and irrational and frightening then as it is today, or more so - which is why we writers and artists at Fawcett created a world of the imagination in which our comic characters lived and did things that we ourselves could not do.
- Today, children are given comic books that give them nightmares. I feel sorry for them. [in the mid-1980s]
- What young boy has not wished that he could be big and strong enough to beat up bullies, rescue fair maidens, and bring crooks and malefactors to justice? Billy Batson could.
- Today the world is not more frightening and horrible than it used to be. It has always been frightening and horrible. There have always been earthquakes and floods and disasters and terrible plagues and wars. We artists and writers and editors at Fawcett, for a few brief years, managed to give our readers glimpses of a better world, the world of the imagination. Then we were swept away and forgotten like so many old, worn-out relics.
- The good old days never existed. They were imaginary, just as Captain Marvel and Billy Batson and Mr. Morris and Sivana and Beautia were. They were an illusion, a dream.
- When I was growing up, there were no comic books. If I had only read comics, they might have questioned it. But I read lots of books - I was an avid reader. My parents were both educated, so we didn't want for books, many of which were beautifully illustrated. I still have some of those very books in my home here today. I have an 1839 edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare, and I still find myself looking over the woodcuts in amazement.
- My work is much more important than my personal life. Interviews today take great delight in probing into the personalities of people, describing their clothing and their hair and what kind of glasses they wear and all that trivia. To me, this is hogwash. Such stuff is written by people just out of a course in writing run by a half-ass professor who believes in 'caring' and 'feeling' and 'sharing' and all that folderol. Phooey on such crap, I say. I'm a professional artist and writer and hope that you are, too. Let's leave that sob-sister stuff to People magazine and such publications. Or DC
- Being in the shape I'm in, I may have a stroke or a heart attack at any time, so let's do what we can while I'm still around. (1987)
- Abut his hometown of Zumbrota, Minnesota: It was very much like one of those old-time, middle America places [Disney] used in his cartoons, the kind of place that doesn't exist anymore. A simple Main Street, music in the park, wooden sidewalks. It's what Walt would have seen as the heartland.
- I have no sympathy for writers and artists who gabble about 'art' and 'feeling' and 'emotion' and 'caring' and all that garbage that is so popular today. This is the mark of the dilettante, the poseur, not of the professional artist. I have always considered myself to be a professional and hope that [these interviews] will make this clear. I'd hate to come across as another old nut who never knew what he was doing until other people told him."
- A well-written story actually will not need pictures added to it, as it will be complete by itself, and the Fawcett stories were well-written. A good writer will tell you only certain things and will not tell you others. If an illustrator draws pictures of the things the writer has already described in words, he will be merely duplicating them and will be wasting the reader's time. If he draws things that the writer has intentionally not mentioned, he will run the risk of spoiling the story, just as he would ruin a magician's act by drawing attention to things from which the magician has deliberately diverted his audience's attention.
- I went to a very small school with limited resources. We had virtually no art classes, but I took what I could. I wanted to learn more, but Zumbrota had no artists living there. One man who lived there was a sign painter, and he taught me what he could, but it was too different from the kind of art I wanted to do. But I did learn some things from him, which today's young artists need to know-you can learn from all kinds of art, not just comic art. It seems like the kids today learned to draw only from comic books, not from anything else. Consequently, they can't really draw.
- I wanted to learn art, not just cartooning. I studied the history of art and art criticism. I never studied cartooning in a formal way. I think that's what's wrong with a lot of cartooning today - the artists never learned anything but a cartoony style, and there's no real substance beneath the cartoony style. But it seems to be popular, so what do I know?
- Adding pictures to a written story, or turning a written story into picture form, as is done in comic-book work, does not increase its appeal to the imagination but diminishes it. This is because the reader is not allowed to use his own imagination to create in his mind how the characters look and act but is forced to accept an artist's version instead.
- I didn't create any of Fawcett's characters-I was just the first person to put them into visual form. They were conceived in Bill Parker's mind; I was just the doctor who held them up and slapped them on their bottoms to make them draw their first breaths.
- When I was illustrating comic books, I always considered the stories to be what we were selling, not the pictures. I looked on myself as the director/producer of a play. My job was to hire the actors, design and produce the scenery and supply the props and costumes. I didn't want to draw the reader's attention to the production itself but to the story that the performers were acting out. I knew that if the story was not good, no amount of lavish overproduction and overacting would make it any better, while if the story was good my work would not make it better, but just clearer and more easy to understand by young people.
- To keep readers from having their attention drawn away from the stories, I deliberately used characters, settings and props that would be instantly recognized by everyone everywhere ... in other words, stereotypes. If the story called for a stuffy corporation head or a conservative banker, I drew a pompous man wearing a high, stiff collar and sporting a small mustache. If he was a crook I gave him a big cigar and a bigger mustache.
- We artists wrote a few stories now and then but they had to be submitted to the editors for approval and put into typed form before they were submitted. There was no "making things up as you go" at Fawcett. Comics just can't be made that way, although many would-be cartoonists and young writers keep trying to show that they can.
- I treated my comic panels as views of a puppet show where heroes, villains and other characters came into view from the left, spoke their lines and then disappeared, to the left it they were not to be used later, to the right if they were part of an ongoing story. When characters fought, they fought each other; when they talked, they faced each other; when they ran, they ran across the stage, not out of it and into the laps of the audience. This kind of presentation was in such contrast to the superhero comics of the time that it caught on immediately and made Captain Marvel the biggest-selling comics of the Golden Age. He was a comic-strip character, as plain and simple as Harold Teen, Daddy Warbucks or Offissa Pupp. He was not - I repeat, not - a superhero. In fact, he wasn't even the hero of the stories he appeared in.
- I have always maintained-and will to my dying day-that Captain Marvel's great success was due not to the way he was drawn but to the stories he appeared in. Fawcett employed professional writers who had to submit plots and outlines for editorial approval before the shooting scripts were written.
- At one time, believe it or not, the publisher sent down word to drop Billy from the stories, saying that he was only taking up room that could have been used to show Captain Marvel instead, and that he wasn't contributing anything to the stories. Fortunately, the editors paid no attention to so ridiculous a memo and Billy Batson continued to appear in every story. Without Bill Batson, Captain Marvel would have been merely another overdrawn, one-dimensional figure in a ridiculous costume, running around beating up crooks and performing meaningless feats of strength like all the other heroic figures of the time who were, with almost no exceptions, cheap imitations of Superman.
- Billy Batson started every story and ended every story. In between, Captain Marvel appeared when he was needed, disappeared when he was not needed. The stories were about Billy Batson, not about the cavortings of a ridiculous superhero for whom the writers had to concoct new and more impossible demonstrations of his powers for each issue.
- We saw Captain Marvel as a sort of big brother brought in to solve problems that the boy hero, Billy, couldn't handle. He was bigger and stronger than Billy, but he was not a seven-foot-tall circus strongman or a creature from another world or one created by a mad scientist, as the superhero comics characters were.
- In fact, I have always felt that flying figures in picture form are silly and unbelievable, and I would much sooner have never drawn them, but the publisher insisted on them. Most of the time Captain Marvel's ability to fly had little or nothing to do with the plots of the stories in which he appeared.
- Personally, I thought Captain Marvel Jr. to be a sickeningly sweet, non-comic and dull character, but some readers loved him. And Mary Marvel was created to attract girl readers. In my opinion, Mary Marvel was a weak, synthetic character also created on the order of the publisher. She never came to life in the way that Billy Batson and Captain Marvel did but always seemed wooden and artificial.
- The super-heroes of the Golden Age had evolved from stories of the Old West, from the great detective stories of the past, and from science-fiction stories dating back to the nineteenth century and earlier. There had been great writers and illustrators in each of these fields in the past; but by the time comic books arrived on the scene, science-fiction, western, and detective stories had degenerated into the trashiest kind of "pulp" fiction, ground out by hack writers and illustrators.
- Captain Marvel and Billy took turns rescuing each other from tight spots; when Captain Marvel was faced with a task for which he was too big and powerful, he changed to small, agile Billy, and vice versa. And usually, although few readers were aware of it, the stories were told by Billy, who never asked anyone to believe that Captain Marvel actually existed any more than Edgar Bergen asked audiences to believe that Charlie McCarthy was a living being or political cartoonists asked viewers to believe that Uncle Sam or their other cartoon figures were actual people.
- Captain Marvel's success, and his appeal to readers now middle-aged who remember him fondly from their childhoods, was due to his being the only true comic character in a field dominated by non-comic characters who appeared in magazines advertised as "Comics" and "Funnies" and "True Tales" but which were neither comic nor funny nor true.
- I never think of myself as a great artist. I was better than some but worse than others - that's all.
- Steamboat was created to capture the affection of negro readers. Unfortunately he offended them instead and was unceremoniously killed off after a delegation of blacks visited the editor's office protesting because he was a servant, because he had huge lips and kinky hair and because he spoke in a dialect. He was always a cartoon character, not intended to be realistic at all, but he was taken seriously by some, sadly enough.
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