Patton Oswalt:

That’s why I hate Last Comic Standing so much — that show is so fucking evil and poisonous. I love the comedians that are on it, and I cannot stand watching these talented comedians get dragged back to the way comedy was in the late ’80s, where it’s that thing of, “Everyone knows this is how you do it. Your whole career comes down to two minutes, and if you fuck that two minutes up, it’s over. So you’d better second-guess, third-guess, fourth-guess everything you say. Really doubt your instincts. Don’t be real up there. You better be terrified of what the audience thinks of you.” That created that whole generation in the mid-to-late-’80s of those bland, forgettable comedians. I can’t even name them, because back then, “You’ve got to get a clean five minutes. It’s got to be perfect. You’ve got to take it on Johnny Carson, and he’s got to wave you over. That’s the only way to do it, and that’s it.” The comedians that really made it and stuck out on Carson were the ones that didn’t do that, the ones that brought something unique to the table: Steve Martin and Richard Pryor early on, then Garry Shandling and Jerry Seinfeld. They brought their own feeling to it. Everyone’s like, “No, no. This is the only way you do it. Don’t do anything personal. Don’t have a single real moment up there.” Basically, don’t have fun. This is not a career, this is spinning the roulette wheel and that’s it. I was like, “No, this is something you get to do your entire life.”

Jhonen Vasquez:

ZE: [laughs] Is there any subject matter you consciously try to avoid when sitting down to write a script or a comic?

JV: To date, no. It’s never crossed my mind to have to baby-sit anyone’s perception of right or wrong, no, so the only conscious decision making as far as content goes is whether or not an idea is right or wrong for the particular project. I’d love to think that the people who choose to pick my noise up are already well enough equipped with a decent balance of hard reason and absurdist thinking to not need to be sat down and told why something is okay or why it isn’t okay. It’s just like in drawing, the more you know what something is supposed to look like in reality, the better equipped you are to abstract it, to stylize it on purpose and have fun with it instead of simply interpreting it badly for lack of education. [via]

That’s a Suicide Girls link, by the by, so maybe NSFW. I guess it depends on where you work.

Brian Michael Bendis:

Every comic book is someone’s first or their last. If someone’s picking this up for the first time, is it entertaining? Can they follow it? You can have a four-part or six-part story, but you should be able to get right in there and figure out what’s going on immediately, without insulting the reader at the same time. And also, someone might read this and go, “I’m never buying another comic book again, I’m moving on to something else. I like girls.” And they never read another comic again, and it’s your responsibility to make that not happen. So these were the theories applied to the Ultimate line more than it was continuity, it was reader-friendly. Don’t talk down to people to get new people in.

I also like how he thinks of problems as “an excuse for creativity.” There’s a great sense of freedom and possibility in that:

You love those films with budgetary concerns, they always find a way to be more creative than they would have been. “Oh, the shark doesn’t work on Jaws?” Okay, Spielberg became a better filmmaker.