Creativity Quote by Jaime Hernandez

A cartoonist’s shrug can carry a whole aesthetic manifesto, and Jaime Hernandez delivers one in street-level prose. Calling an adaptation or remix a “secondary form” frames the original as the default authority, the canonical source you’re supposed to revere. Then he punctures that reverence with a practical, maker’s-eye concession: sometimes the copy, the translation, the cover, the film version hits harder. Not often, but enough to matter.

The line works because it refuses both extremes. Hernandez isn’t doing the purist scold routine (“the book is always better”), and he’s not handing out a blank check to the content-industrial machine that treats everything as IP to be repackaged. He’s staking out a working artist’s middle ground: hierarchy exists, craft is real, and exceptions are earned. That “certainly a rarity” lands like a raised eyebrow at Hollywood’s default pitch deck, where “based on” becomes a license to sand down what was strange, local, or formally risky in the first place.

Contextually, it’s hard not to hear a comics lifer talking. Hernandez comes from a medium historically treated as “secondary” itself - disposable entertainment, juvenile ephemera - yet capable of artistry that adaptations often struggle to reproduce. The subtext is protective, not precious: form matters. When a secondary version surpasses the original, it’s not because marketing willed it so; it’s because someone found a new angle, a new rhythm, a new emotional delivery that the first form couldn’t access. Rare, yes. Possible, also yes. That’s the real permission slip here.