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He was broken from the start. And this stupid world took what was left of him and ground it into sand.
Ed Brubaker -
I loved you, you know... It's not my fault the world is what it is.
Ed Brubaker
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The world went insane before I did, I'm just adapting to the new reality.
Ed Brubaker -
If you don't have that empty white space around everything in the comics, the border of the page, then it feels like you're a little claustrophobic.
Ed Brubaker -
Can't be part of the rat race when you're one of the rats who knows you're in a cage.
Ed Brubaker -
The good part of what comics trains you to do is it trains you - especially if you've worked in mainstream comics like Marvel and DC, or if you're just doing your own independent comics - to compartmentalize things and work on multiple things at the same time. And that's a skill that is incredibly handy in Hollywood, because within the first year that you get here, you realize there's a reason why every successful person in Hollywood has like seven or eight projects up in the air at any point.
Ed Brubaker -
There's a reason why every successful person in Hollywood has like seven or eight projects up in the air at any point. It's like a 90 percent chance for each project that it'll never happen. Every project has about a 10 percent chance of getting made, unless you're like a Quentin Tarantino or somebody who just gets whatever they want to get done. But those are the rare cases.
Ed Brubaker -
I vividly remember being in my mid- to late-20s. That part of life is very emotional, and exciting, and dramatic in a way that your late 40s are not. That's different and dramatic in other ways, but I wanted to tap into that angry youth vibe in Kill Or Be Killed that I remember feeling at that time, instead of my angry middle-aged vibe that I've been churning out for a few years.
Ed Brubaker
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I prefer to control my brain's dopamine reactions myself. Not be at the mercy of... butterflies.
Ed Brubaker -
I guess you only know your home when you come back to it.
Ed Brubaker -
And before it was over, Tracy did get the answers he wanted, and a few he didn't. But it seemed to him that was just the nature of answers.
Ed Brubaker -
I had done a couple TV pilots, and a friend of mine wanted to leave comics and come work in Hollywood, and I said, "Well, you've got to understand that when you sell a TV pilot, imagine if you turned in the best issue of Batman ever, and DC was like, 'Well we love this, but we can't publish it because we have to publish this other thing by this other person." The odds are really long on getting anything made, so if you come from comics and you're still making a living in comics, that really helps because you're not desperate for someone's permission to write for a living.
Ed Brubaker -
There is no us, and you know that as well as I do. There can’t be. This is just a dream we’re having. While all our friends sleep.
Ed Brubaker -
Whatever you do, remember that. You're going to make a difference. A lot of times it won't be huge, it won't be visible even. But it will matter just the same. Don't do it for praise or money, that's what I want to tell you. Do it because it needs to be done. Do it to make your world better.
Ed Brubaker
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Sometimes when I'm writing a superhero story I wonder if they really have to punch each other in the face. Is that really going to solve anything? I feel the same way sometimes when I watch episodes of Law & Order. I'm like, "Yeah, right. You found the sex offender and now everything is fine." TV is big on closure, but I think closure is horseshit in real life. I'm still haunted by stuff I did in my teen years when I think about it too much.
Ed Brubaker -
With comics, you can only really learn what you're doing wrong or what works best when you see your work published. I've been publishing comics since my 20s, and still, when I flip through any of my new comics, I still only see the things that I wish I'd done better. But that's how you learn, by seeing it.
Ed Brubaker -
The political vibe of late-'40s Hollywood through the mid-'50s is something we're seeing a lot of echoes of right now, and in a scary way, where I'm wishing for an Edward R. Murrow to stand up and start somehow calling people on stuff. But as far as the way the industry works, I feel like we're in a place where you see companies slowly moving back to only doing their own stuff.
Ed Brubaker -
A sailor at war with the wind and the sea.
Ed Brubaker -
Wealth wants to be able to do whatever the fuck it wants to... And it's winning the war.
Ed Brubaker -
And she thinks she is the lucky one because she got to escape.
Ed Brubaker
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I've never been much for tears, anyway.
Ed Brubaker -
You can sit and write in your room all you want, but until other people see it, until you see it produced for television or film or something, you're not 100 percent sure if what you wrote is actually going to work.
Ed Brubaker -
It's a lot easier to make a living as a writer in Hollywood than it was probably 10 years ago, though there's still just as many unemployed people in Hollywood as there ever has been, but there's so many more avenues to sell things, because of digital, and Amazon, and Netflix, and all these different platforms. That's crazy and exciting in a creative way, and we'll see where that all stands five years from now. But on the corporate side, I still see that pendulum swinging back in that other direction, which is a little not comforting.
Ed Brubaker