- ‘In comics an event has not happened unless it can be seen to have happened. Thus, you can’t refer back to something that only happened in a word balloon. Technically it didn’t happen at all.’
- ‘We talk about timing in comics, but there really is no time except in a periodical sense, i.e. “next issue.” All the pages of a comic book arrive simultaneously.’
- ‘The page is like a map of the world. Similar kinds of events tend to happen in the same region, like say, hurricanes in the Caribbean.’
- ‘Everything is symbolic even if you don’t mean it to be. If you part a character’s hair in the middle instead of the side, the reader will infer a meaning. If you give him a pimple on his nose, expect to have to explain it.’
- ‘Anyway, the last of my rules is that you must show at least one pair of feet on every page.’
— Eddie Cambell’s principles toward a rhetoric of the comic-strip vocabulary
(drawing by Levon Jihanian, cloud photograph by Camille Seaman)
