Art & Creativity Quote by Jaime Hernandez

Hernandez is pushing back on the long-running insecurity baked into comics culture: the need to justify itself as Art with a capital A. "Comics as art" lands here less like a manifesto than a weary label slapped on him by critics, museums, and think-piece gravity. His reply is almost stubbornly practical. He does "comics as comics" because the medium already contains its own grammar: time chopped into panels, emotion carried by line, meaning built from what’s shown and what’s withheld between frames. The defensiveness is telling. When a form is constantly asked to prove its legitimacy, the temptation is to overdesign the "package" - formal flash, self-conscious cleverness, prestige-signaling. Hernandez refuses that bargain.

The rhythm of his phrasing matters: "Simple. Basic". It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-vanity. He’s staking out a craft ethic where clarity is a moral choice. "Let the characters have the excitement" is a shot at the kind of formal pyrotechnics that turn protagonists into props for the creator’s virtuosity. In Hernandez’s world, style is in service of people - their contradictions, their quiet turns, their lived-in histories - not in service of a pitch deck about why comics deserve a seat at the grown-ups’ table.

Contextually, coming from a creator central to alternative comics’ maturation, this reads as both boundary-setting and mission statement: the revolution isn’t making comics respectable; it’s making them honest, letting story and character do the heavy lifting without apologizing for the medium that carries them.