Love Quote by Sergio Aragones

Aragones is smuggling a philosophy of time into what sounds like a casual format preference. The line isn’t really a swipe at novels so much as a cartoonist’s manifesto: storytelling should move like a gag lands - fast, clean, and with no patience for self-importance. When he says “one thing happening,” he’s naming the dread many readers feel but rarely admit: the long trudge of setup disguised as depth.

The intent is pragmatic and almost moral. Comics, for Aragones, aren’t a “lesser” form that compensates with pictures; they’re an efficiency machine. A few marks can establish a character, a setting, a conflict, and a punchline. The subtext is a defense of compression as craft. To make a story “just a few pages” and still satisfying requires ruthless selection: you keep only the moments that do narrative work. That’s not impatience. That’s discipline.

Context matters: Aragones is famous for near-wordless, lightning-quick humor (Mad magazine margins, Groo the Wanderer). His career is built on visual velocity - sight gags, kinetic bodies, instant reads. So the quote also reads as a working artist’s refusal of bloat, whether it’s in prose or in culture. In an attention economy that constantly wastes your time while demanding more of it, Aragones’ love for comics becomes quietly radical: respect the reader, get to the point, and make the “thing happening” unavoidable.