Ultraist Studios Blog Journal thoughts, musings and other rambling…

Grant Morrison quote:

“I’ve been reading about the scientific theory of emergence, which is basically that if you get a bunch of simple things together, and you get enough of them, they start to form something complex. Like, a single sponge cell is completely stupid, but a bunch of sponge cells can actually do stuff, move around, eat, keep themselves going. So, I was applying this theory to writing. Because, we’ve all heard the story about how writers talk about they get to a point in the story when it gets so involved and the story and the characters seem to take over. And as a writer I can say that actually happens, there’s a moment when the story takes over and you’re kind of forced into making choices that you may’ve not made otherwise. So I like the idea that there’s maybe actually something going on here that had to do with emergence, that you can make the story complex enough that the story almost begins to compute for itself, and start to think for itself.” *

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John Romita Jr quote:

“I’m a fan of several different artists.  Leinil Yu and David Finch and Bryan Hitch. Those three guys I get their books and I keep them near by my desk and I look at what they do.  They’re a breath of fresh air in the industry.  I still keep Jim Lee’s work and both of the Kubert brothers work around.  Now what I mean by ‘keep around’ is … there are moments when I wake up on a monday morning and I’m not in the greatest working mode, and that’s true of anybody.  So what I do is I pick through and look through some of the other guy’s work and see how much ambition they put in theirs.  AND THEN (and you’re going to think I’m out of my fricken mind) I go to message boards and have people send me links to all of my critics (not all, but the people who hate my stuff) and I read the poison that is e-mailed to the message board and it inspires me.  So between the young studs that are really really good and the banannas that hate my guts online, it gets me in the mood to work.  And if THAT doesn’t work, I open up my mortgage payment bills everymonth, and that REALLY inspires me.” *

Mark Millar quote:

“Johnny’s got the best work ethic that I’ve ever seen in my life – even outside of comics. I’ve never seen anyone who works as hard as Johnny. He gets up at like 5 am, and does an hour in the gym, and just starts drawing. He’s like a comics drawing machine – he can turn a full issue around in a week, and it’s better than anyone else. Rumor has that he did one issue of Spider-Man in four days one time. There’s no one like him – he’s Marvel’s greatest asset.” *

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Shane Glines quote:

“It just got to the point where I got really fed up with it, and I just decided that I don’t want to go through this anymore. It got to a point where I just did not enjoy drawing. And to me that was just tragic because that was the one thing in my life that I could always depend on… you know, that I loved, and it brought me pleasure, and all of a sudden it’s causing me so much pain that I was thinking of changing my career and just going to work for a gas station.

I really worked hard, I did everything from reading Tony Robbins books, to reading books about NLP: Neuro Linguistic Programming, trying to figure out what the Hell is going on in my brain, why have I linked so much pain to this to the point where I can’t even start working?

I’d sit down to draw, and I’d put all this pressure on me, that, you know… you can imagine, to sit down and create in that mindset is just impossible. So I just really worked hard to sort of get back to figuring out what I enjoyed about it when I first started drawing to please myself.

And being a lot more organized as far as my schedule and every night I’d sit down with my notebook and I’d plan out what I’m gonna work on the next day, and you know, just try to become more professional.” *

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Seth book title:

“It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken” *

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