Gil Kane Quotes (25 Quotes)

First of all there was a guy named Charles Nicholas, who used to do all of the inking that Jack and Simon didn't do. Simon used to do splashes and covers, but Charles Nicholas, after a while, did the inside of all of the stuff.

Comics were going down for the second time and here, all of a sudden, came this thing and for the next fifteen years, romance comics were about the top sellers in the field; they outsold everything.

Everything was sensory and I never saw the structure in anything.

DC used to print up all of their pages, they were the only company that did it.

If I had one quality that really ruined me and at the same time helped me, it was the fact that I never stopped looking, and by that time I was really working at it.

I started working in production and I worked there for three weeks but apparently they thought I was making too much noise and they fired me.

All of the penciling was consistently done by one person and the inking was whoever could finish on time.

But I was also a big mouth, I started to develop a troubled relationship with Harry Shorten.

Then the war became a real problem and along with other shortages, they started to have paper problems.

I was hired as a penciler.

But generally speaking, people weren't fired, art jobs were very hard to get, so something really calamitous had to happen to a person who was working there in order for you to find a space.

The publishers were like syndicates. For instance, the guys that DC hired in 1936, those guys were still working there years later.

Coming into the business, you'd pass through these little agencies until you got to understand what was happening in the business, unless you were really able to have a style strong enough to go directly to the publishers.

My first job came the next year at 16.

As a matter of fact, I didn't even have a drawing table or a light or anything because I never had a professional job in my life.

It was exactly an assembly line. You could look into infinity down these rows of drawing tables.

I think the lack of precision and deep focus is why it took me years to build up my work.

Most of us came out of Popeye, so turning Popeye into something believable was tricky enough.

In other words, DC was never harmed by the paper shortages.

I was hired to do as many Boy Commando, Newsboy Legion, and Sandman stories as I could.

Within a couple of days I got a job with Jack Binder's agency. Jack Binder had a loft on Fifth Avenue and it just looked like an internment camp.

I was not too smart and constantly mouthed off and didn't know anything.

Precision is not one of the qualities that comes out in my work.

I just saw the emotion in everything, so I got to feel everything that was going on and that I was viewing, but I couldn't think in terms of structure, which is the whole point of deep focus.

By the end of the '50s, everything began to collapse and, little by little, I lost all of my work. I lost Rex, the Wonder Dog and all the westerns.