Art & Creativity Quote by Jerry B. Jenkins

“Gil Thorpe” gets praised here less as a character than as a pressure valve. When Jerry B. Jenkins calls the strip “a great diversion,” he’s admitting a practical truth about writing novels: the work can be long, lonely, and relentlessly logical. Diversion isn’t procrastination in this framing; it’s cross-training. A daily comic operates on tight constraints, fast payoffs, and visual rhythm, letting the mind practice surprise and compression without the heavy freight of plot architecture.

The second clause is the real sleight of hand: “to book writing as poetry is to prose.” Jenkins borrows one of literature’s oldest hierarchies - poetry as concentrated essence, prose as extended argument - and maps it onto two kinds of storytelling labor. Book writing (his home turf) is prose: sustained, cumulative, engineered to carry a reader for hundreds of pages. “Gil Thorpe,” by contrast, is “poetry”: small-space narrative that has to hit mood, character, and motion in a few beats. The compliment isn’t that comics are elevated; it’s that they’re distilled.

Subtext: Jenkins is signaling craft values. He’s not romanticizing inspiration; he’s admiring efficiency, the ability to imply an entire world with a handful of lines. Coming from a prolific, deadline-driven novelist, it also reads as self-justification: the “diversion” is productive because it teaches economy, timing, and the courage to cut. In an era when comics and “serious” literature still get sorted into separate cultural bins, Jenkins quietly collapses the distinction by judging both with the same metric: density of effect.