I had no television when I was little, just a stack of old, beat-up comics from the 1950s and 1960s.
Daniel ClowesYou have to find the tone of the piece and modulate that. There are ways to indicate that - I try to incorporate the biggest range I can within the story, going from humorous to serious without it being jarring. That's the hardest part, to keep that balance. It requires being constantly aware of where you are in the story. You can't really do that in a movie: You can't slightly modulate the tone by the way the character's eyeballs look in one certain scene.
Daniel ClowesI've had a real lucky time working in Hollywood. I've talked to other screenwriters, and they're all kind of beaten down and their spirits are crushed, because they work on these screenplays and these projects, and then directors either take them and change everything, rewrite them and make them worse, or they film them and they're nothing like how they imagined it to be.
Daniel ClowesI think a comic looks better in the magazine. The colors are designed to be on paper, not illuminated on screen. I don't like the aspect of people reading it for free. When people get things for free, they tend to not take them as seriously. But I don't know. I'm sure 10 times more people are reading it online than in the actual paper.
Daniel ClowesSurely comics require more effort on the part of the reader than movies or television. I'm always learning new things you can do with comics that wouldn't work in any other medium, and often they require the need to process a lot of dense information. Of course, the trick is to make the complicated seem effortless and spontaneous.
Daniel ClowesI enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols. The reader reads into them something worse than what you normally would have. They work as this outburst of incoherent anger. I've found ways to write around swearing that are much more effective, rather than going for what someone really would say.
Daniel Clowes