Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Kirkman

Kirkman’s confession isn’t precious writer-talk; it’s a practical admission from someone who built his career in a medium where the “sentence” is inseparable from the panel. “I have trouble writing” is deliberately plain, almost sheepish, but it smuggles in a bigger claim: story doesn’t begin with eloquence, it begins with an image you can stage. For a comics-first storyteller, pacing, suspense, and even character are architectural problems. If you can’t picture the look, you can’t feel where the beat lands.

The line also telegraphs a working-class ethic about craft. Kirkman isn’t romanticizing inspiration; he’s describing a workflow constraint. Visualizing “how things are going to look” means knowing where the camera sits, what the reader’s eye hits first, how a reveal fits into a page turn, how silence can be inked as negative space. That’s not decoration after the fact; it’s the engine that produces tension and clarity. In The Walking Dead, for example, dread lives in compositions as much as dialogue: a doorway framed just so, a small figure swallowed by empty landscape, a face held one panel too long.

Subtextually, it’s also a gentle demotion of the lone author myth. To write in images is to think in collaboration: with artists, letterers, colorists, and the physical realities of print. Kirkman’s intent reads like an anti-snob stance: if you can’t see it, it’s not ready. The “look” is the outline, the editing, the truth test all at once.