Time & Perspective Quote by Jaime Hernandez

Hernandez is confessing to a dirty little secret of craft: skill is often built on theft that isn’t theft. “Copy” here isn’t a scandal; it’s apprenticeship, a way of turning the outside world into muscle memory. The first half is almost tender in its practicality - copy once, own forever. It’s the economics of attention: a single careful study pays compound interest across an entire career.

Then he swerves into the part artists rarely romanticize. Research, in his telling, isn’t libraries and mystique; it’s the petty misery of looking. Not drawing a car, not even finding a car - just opening a magazine, scanning a page, lifting your eyes to the window. That’s the punchline and the sting. He’s naming how “reference” demands you admit ignorance in real time. Copying is controlled pain; research is vulnerability, a confrontation with the fact that your mental default-car is probably a cartoon lie.

In comics especially, this matters. Hernandez built a world that feels lived-in, not generic: bodies that move like bodies, neighborhoods with specific gravity. Getting there means resisting the seductive shorthand of “a car,” “a house,” “a street,” and replacing it with an actual car, an actual street - choices that quietly anchor the fiction. His gripe is funny because it’s true: the hard part isn’t technique, it’s honesty. Research forces you to see what’s really there, not what your style wants to believe.