War & Peace Quote by Phil Foglio

Foglio’s punchline lands because it’s equal parts bravado and self-own: the adolescent manifesto of “a fight or an explosion on every page” delivered with the dry shrug of someone who already knows how the industry will react. The word “requirement” is doing sly work here. It frames maximalist spectacle as a principled aesthetic, not a lack of restraint. Then the second sentence flips the romance of that stance into reality: “Naturally, no one wanted to publish it.” The “naturally” is the tell - a creator laughing at his own youthful absolutism, and at the marketplace’s predictable gatekeeping, in the same breath.

There’s also a cartoonist’s practical intelligence underneath the joke. Foglio isn’t confessing failure so much as sketching a career tactic: keep the character, keep making stories, keep the muscles warm. “Did a few stories to keep my hand in” is craft talk disguised as casualness; it’s the discipline of repetition, the unglamorous part of building a voice. The explosions may be a gag, but the work ethic isn’t.

Context matters: Foglio comes out of an American comics culture where genre pleasures (pulp action, slapstick violence, sci-fi mayhem) have always been both the engine of readership and the excuse critics use to dismiss the form. He’s winking at that tension. The subtext is a defense of fun as a legitimate creative north star - and an admission that sometimes the way to survive the gatekeepers is to keep drawing anyway, until your “unpublishable” instincts become your signature.