"The sizes and shapes of the panels have never been important to my stories. It has always been the words and images that drew me in, kind of like watching a movie"
About this Quote
Jaime Hernandez is quietly swatting away one of comics culture's favorite obsessions: the panel grid as sacred architecture. When he says size and shape "have never been important", he's not dismissing craft so much as re-centering it. The real engine, he insists, is the fuse between words and images, the alchemy that makes ink feel like lived time. That's a provocation in a medium that often fetishizes formal innovation as proof of seriousness. Hernandez flips the value system: if the page is a machine, the layout is just the casing.
The movie comparison is doing sly work. He's not claiming comics should imitate film; he's describing the sensation of absorption, that unselfconscious glide where you stop "reading comics" and start inhabiting motion, mood, and voice. For an artist associated with Love and Rockets - stories built on character psychology, social texture, and scenes that breathe - this is also an aesthetic manifesto. A rigid emphasis on panel geometry can become a kind of gatekeeping, privileging design talk over what his work excels at: rhythm, dialogue, and the emotional pressure between people.
The subtext is democratic and a little punk. You don't need to decode layouts to be moved. You need images that feel observed and words that land with the specificity of real speech. Hernandez is defending story as experience, not puzzlebox - and, in the process, reminding critics that virtuosity can be invisible when the storytelling is that fluent.
The movie comparison is doing sly work. He's not claiming comics should imitate film; he's describing the sensation of absorption, that unselfconscious glide where you stop "reading comics" and start inhabiting motion, mood, and voice. For an artist associated with Love and Rockets - stories built on character psychology, social texture, and scenes that breathe - this is also an aesthetic manifesto. A rigid emphasis on panel geometry can become a kind of gatekeeping, privileging design talk over what his work excels at: rhythm, dialogue, and the emotional pressure between people.
The subtext is democratic and a little punk. You don't need to decode layouts to be moved. You need images that feel observed and words that land with the specificity of real speech. Hernandez is defending story as experience, not puzzlebox - and, in the process, reminding critics that virtuosity can be invisible when the storytelling is that fluent.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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