Top 30 Scott McCloud Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Learn from everyone. Follow no one. Watch for patterns. Work like hell.”

— Scott McCloud

2. “In comics at its best, words and pictures are like partners in a dancer and each one takes turns leading.”

— Scott McCloud

3. “Creator and reader are partners in the invisible creating something out of nothing, time and time again.”

— Scott McCloud

4. “To kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths.”

— Scott McCloud

5. “My dad was an inventor, and I think I’ve always had a rosy view of technology, or at least its potential.”

— Scott McCloud

6. “The idea that comics stores, distributors and publishers simply ‘give the customers what they want’ is nonsense. What the customers wanted they didn’t get – and they left.”

— Scott McCloud

7. “A medium is a bridge between two minds.”

— Scott McCloud

8. “My dad was an engineer and so I had this picture of science and technology and pursuits of the mind as being more impressive than artistic pursuits, which I saw a as kind of frivolous.”

— Scott McCloud

9. “Space does for comics what time does for film!”

— Scott McCloud

10. “By stripping down an image to essential meaning, an artist can simplify that meaning.”

— Scott McCloud

11. “Today, comics is one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard.”

— Scott McCloud

12. “All the things we experience in life can be separated into two realms, the realm of the concept and the realm of the senses.”

— Scott McCloud

13. “Amplification through simplification.”

— Scott McCloud

14. “Think of your face as a mask. That’s what it is, after all. A mask. Facing outward. Worn from the day you were born. Slave to your every mental command. Seen by everyone you meet. But never by you. Open its eyes now. Just think it. The mask will obey.”

— Scott McCloud

15. “The panel acts as a sort of general indicator that time or space is being divided. The durations of that time and the dimensions of that space are defined more by contents of the panel than by the panel itself.”

— Scott McCloud

16. “As I see it, mainstream comics now speak only to the hardcore few who stayed; conversing in a weird, garbled, visual pig latin only they can understand – rendering the term ‘mainstream’ a hollow joke – while the true mainstream, the other 99.9% of the populace, find enjoyment elsewhere.”

— Scott McCloud

17. “Form and content must never apologize for each other.”

— Scott McCloud

18. “All through my comics career, I was always trying to reinvent the form.”

— Scott McCloud

19. “There’s a very big part of me that just wants to take all of comics history and toss it on the bonfire. I’d sort of like to get on to the future.”

— Scott McCloud

20. “The natural world creates great beauty every day, yet the only rules of composition it follows are those of function and chance.”

— Scott McCloud

21. “We all live in a state of profound isolation. No other human being can ever know what it’s like to be you from the inside. And no amount of reaching out to others can ever make them feel exactly what you feel. All media of communication are a by-product of our sad inability to communicate directly from mind to mind.”

— Scott McCloud

22. “When you’re free of editorial control, you owe it to yourself to obtain feedback from friends and readers. Some take those criticisms to heart and incorporate it into their work, and some ignore them.”

— Scott McCloud

23. “The notion of getting under the hood and explaining how something works, that’s fairly familiar territory to me.”

— Scott McCloud

24. “I’ve always been very forward-looking, and it was actually kind of difficult to turn my gaze backwards to look at comics history.”

— Scott McCloud

25. “If a comic comes out on the scene and it’s really knock-out brilliant, the community is pretty good about getting the word about good newcomers.”

— Scott McCloud

26. “My first influences were superhero artists.”

— Scott McCloud

27. “To be a “thing” that thinks and moves and wants... that’s MIRACULOUS.”

— Scott McCloud

28. “Webcomics are much bigger than any one scene can circumscribe.”

— Scott McCloud

29. “If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you’ll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they’ll kick your ass every time.”

— Scott McCloud

30. “I don’t think the potential for comics in nonfiction has been exploited nearly as much as it could be.”

— Scott McCloud

31. “It would take a lifetime to read all the webcomics published in one year.”

— Scott McCloud

32. “I wouldn’t necessarily have been making books about how to make comics if I’d really felt I knew how to make comics.”

— Scott McCloud

33. “And what better way to reinvent the form than to toss virtually 99% of everything that’s been done with it and start with a brand-new canvas, reinvent it from the ground up? Digital comics gave me the opportunity to do that, and producing things digitally gave me the opportunity to do that.”

— Scott McCloud

34. “It wasn’t until I discovered comics that I actually began to approach drawing as a possible career.”

— Scott McCloud