Doom Comic Quotes

Kipling: Where's your sense of humor? Rebis: We're working on reconstructing it...

Marion: What is all this? What's going on? Clint: The same thing that's always going on. The end of the world.

That was one of the things about him. He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.

Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever at one but which maintains chapters in every city -- in every cranium -- in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

ROTHKO: (Explodes) 'Pretty.' 'Beautiful.' 'Nice.' 'Fine.' That's our life now! Everything's 'fine'. We put on the funny nose and glasses and slip on the banana peel and the TV makes everything happy and everyone's laughing all the time, it's all so goddamn funny, it's our constitutional right to be amused all the time, isn't it? We're a smirking nation, living under the tyranny of 'fine.' How are you? Fine.. How was your day? Fine. How are you feeling? Fine. How did you like the painting? Fine. What some dinner? Fine... Well, let me tell you, everything is not fine!! HOW ARE YOU?!... HOW WAS YOUR DAY?!... HOW ARE YOU FEELING? Conflicted. Nuanced. Troubled. Diseased. Doomed. I am not fine. We are not fine. We are anything but fine... Look at these pictures. Look at them! You see the dark rectangle, like a doorway, an aperture, yes but it’s also a gaping mouth letting out a silent howl of something feral and foul and primal and REAL. Not nice. Not fine. Real. A moan of rapture. Something divine or damned. Something immortal, not comic books or soup cans, something beyond me and beyond now. And whatever it is, it’s not pretty and it’s not fine...I AM HERE TO STOP YOUR HEART‬

Doctor Doom was exactly the sort of bastard who would have armed al-Qaeda with death rays and killer robots if he thought for one second it would piss off the hated Reed Richards and the rest of his mortal enemies in the Fantastic Four, but here he was sobbing with the best of them, as representative not of evil, but of Marvel Comics' collective shock, struck dumb and moved to hand-drawn tears by the thought that anyone could hate America and its people enough to do this.

In another assignment, he wrote about how one day, when he refused to do extracredit homework, his mother padlocked his comic book collection in a closet; unable to pick the lock, he removed the hinges and took off the door.

We're your guardians until my uncle tracks down your cousin and arrests him." Tammy's face was almost comical in its incredulity. "But it's daylight," she said at last. "Vampires can't go out in the sun, everyone knows that!" Bones chuckled. "Right. And we shrink back from crosses, can't travel over water, can't enter a home unless invited, and always get staked in the end by the righteous slayer. Really, who'd be afraid of a creature like that? All you'd need is a Bible, a tanning bed, and some holy water to send us shivering to our dooms.

Tonight, no one will rage and cry: "My Kingdom for a horse!" No ghost will come to haunt the battlements of a castle in the kingdom of Denmark where, apparently something is rotten. Nor will anyone wring her hands and murmur: "Leave, I do not despise you." Three still young women will not retreat to a dacha whispering the name of Moscow, their beloved, their lost hope. No sister will await the return of her brother to avenge the death of their father, no son will be forced to avenge an affront to his father, no mother will kill her three children to take revenge on their father. And no husband will see his doll-like wife leave him out of contempt. No one will turn into a rhinoceros. Maids will not plot to assassinate their mistress, after denouncing her lover and having him jailed. No one will fret about "the rain in Spain!" No one will emerge from a garbage pail to tell an absurd story. Italian families will not leave for the seashore. No soldier will return from World War II and bang on his father's bedroom dor protesting the presence of a new wife in his mother's bed. No evanescent blode will drown. No Spanish nobleman will seduce a thousand and three women, nor will an entire family of Spanish women writhe beneath the heel of the fierce Bernarda Alba. You won't see a brute of a man rip his sweat-drenched T-shirt, shouting: "Stella! Stella!" and his sister-in-law will not be doomed the minute she steps off the streetcar named Desire. Nor will you see a stepmother pine away for her new husband's youngest son. The plague will not descend upon the city of Thebes, and the Trojan War will not take place. No king will be betrayed by his ungrateful daughters. There will be no duels, no poisonings, no wracking coughs. No one will die, or, if someone must die, it will become a comic scene. No, there will be none of the usual theatrics. What you will see tonight is a very simple woman, a woman who will simply talk...

There's a certain kind of rain that falls only in comics, a thick, persistent drizzle, much heavier than normal water, that bounces off whatever it hits, dripping from fedoras, running slowly down windowpanes and reflecting the doom in bad men's hearts. It's called an "eisnershpritz," and it's named after the late Will Eisner, one of the preeminent stylists of twentieth-century comics, who never drew a foreboding scene that couldn't be made a little more foreboding with a nice big downpour.

To all the usual folks: Mom, Sally, Nik, Russell, the DFWWW, my agent, my editor, Orbit Books, the people who buy the books, Optimus Prime, and the rest. You’re still just as important as you ever were and this is a lot easier because of you. To Atomic Robo, for keeping my love of comic books alive and well. And to Victor Von Doom.

Just as the attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are doomed to be short-circuited by microtechnology. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year 2000. The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.

Jake,” I murmur. He opens his eyes. “Are you absolutely sure this is what you want? The baby, I mean.” “I’m sure.” His gaze drops to my stomach. “This baby will be made of everything I have loved my whole life.” “I’m gonna get fat,” I mumble. “No, you’re going to get even sexier.” Coming close again, he wraps his arms around me tightly, rubbing the tip of his nose against mine. “How could I not want something made up of Trudy Wethers’s DNA?” “Still Bennett.” I grin. “You haven’t made an honest woman of me yet.” “You ready to hop that plane to Vegas now?” “A shotgun wedding. My folks would be so proud.” I laugh. “What do you want to do about the wedding?” he asks. “Move it forward?” “That would give me a matter of weeks to plan it. Why don’t we just wait until after the baby is born?” I see him quickly do the math in his head. “We wouldn’t be able to get married July twenty-first. You okay with that?” “I’m going to have a mini-Jake soon. Of course I’m okay with that.” “Or a mini-Tru,” he says. Then his expression suddenly changes. “Fuck, a girl. We might have to lock her up, Tru.” I scrunch up my face. “Why?” “Because, if she looks anything like you, I’m one day going to be fighting off horny teenage boys left, right, and centre. I’ll probably end up in jail for beating one to death if I find him with his hands on my baby girl.” He shudders comically. I let out a laugh. “Let’s hope if we have a boy, he’s doesn’t grow up to be one of those horny teenagers…or God forbid, as horny as you are. Otherwise we’ll have some girl’s dad round here kicking his ass.” “Then I’ll end up in jail for beating the shit out of the dad—fuck, this is a no-win, sweetheart,” he groans, dropping his head back against the rest. “I’m doomed to a future behind bars.” Laughing softly, I say, “Don’t worry, baby, we’ll figure a way to keep you out of prison.” I kiss the tip of his nose, then open the door, ready to get out of the car and into the house to bed.

However, like Elasti-Girl and Batgirl, many of the DC’s female characters got better treatment than the heroines featured in Marvel Comics. Scanning a comic book rack in the ’60s, the covers would tell two different stories about the women starring within those pages. Wonder Woman and Supergirl starred in comic books that featured their names on the covers. These heroines were often seen performing great feats of strength like battling monsters or stopping missiles with their bare hands. Batgirl’s name might be featured prominently on a cover of Detective Comics. The Doom Patrol’s Elasti-Girl was shown in the thick of battle fighting side by side with her male compatriots. On the Marvel Comics covers, Invisible Girl, Wasp, and Marvel Girl were shown struggling in the clutches of a villain, or watching helplessly from the background as their male teammates took care of business.

Meanwhile back at the mailbox, the plot was thickening. The valentine pace was rapidly quickening. Still another valentine Awaited Brother there. It first caught the eye of small Sister Bear. It was flowery and pink and smelled of perfume. It increased Brother’s feeling of Valentine’s doom. It was even mushier than the one before. As far as he was concerned, this thing called “love” was a terrible, awful, sickening bore. “And as I said before in no uncertain terms, when it comes to mush, I would rather eat worms.

Full Disclosure: when Dan DiDio approached me about doing one, I was wary to say the least. Nowadays events often mean character deaths or reboots or company-wide publishing initiatives and so on. But the run Greg Capullo and I had on BATMAN was, for better or for worse, idiosyncratic - about our own hopes, our fears, our interests. It was just... very much ours. Even so, I told Dan that I *did* have a story, one I'd been working on for a few years, a big one, in the back of my brain. It was about a detective case that stretched back to the beginnings of humanity, a mystery about the nature of the DC Universe that Batman would try to uncover, and which would lead him and the Justice League to discover that their own cosmology was much larger, scarier and more wondrous than they'd known. But I wasn't sure it would make a good "event". Dan, to his credit, said, "Work it up and let's see." So I did. But in the course of working it up, I reread all the events I could think of. Just for reference. Not only recent ones, but events from years ago, from when I was a kid. And what I discovered, or rediscovered, was that at their core, events are joyous things. They're these great big stories, ridiculous tales about alien invasions or cosmic gems or zombie-space-cop attacks that have the highest stakes possible - stories where the whole universe hangs in the balance and nothing will ever be the same again! They were *about* things, and - what I also realized while doing my homework - when I was a kid, they were THE stories that brought me and my friends together. We'd split our money and buy different parts of an event, just to be able to argue about it. We'd meet after school and go on for hours about who should win, who should lose... Because even the grimmest events are celebratory. They're about pushing the limits of an already ludicrous form to a breaking point. So that's what I came back with. I remember standing in my kitchen and getting ready to pitch DARK NIGHTS: METAL to Greg, having prepared a whole presentation, a whole argument as to why, crazy as it was, it was us, it was *our* event. I said "It's called METAL," and Greg said, "I'm in," before I could even tell him the story. And even though Dan thought it was crazy, he went with it, and for that I'm very grateful. In the end, METAL is a lot of things - it's about those moments when you find yourself face to face with the worst versions of yourself, moments when all looks like doom - but at it's heart it's a love letter to comic storytelling at its most lunatic, and a tribute to the kinds of stories, events that got me thought hard times as a kid and as an adult. It's about using friendship as a foundation to go further than you thought you could go, and that means it's about me and Greg, and you as well. Because we tried something different with it, something ours, hoping you'd show up, and you did. So thank you, sincerely, from all of us on the team. Because when they work, events are about coming together and rocking out over our love of this crazy art form. And you're all in the band, now and always.

America is no longer a real country. It’s a reality TV set. The UK, the effective 51st State of America, isn’t far behind. China isn’t mired in superhero culture. It’s obsessed with making itself truly great. The USA and the UK are up to their necks in their demented fantasies. They have a comic-book psyche. Superhero stories and deranged conspiracy theories are the only things they understand. It’s all coming down. It’s all falling apart. Mad beliefs produce mad people, and a mad people is a doomed people. Enough of superheroes. The people themselves must become the heroes, or it’s game over.

To be honest, I had to kind of sit a couple of weeks to figure out why I wanted to do this. I know it sounds pretentious, but MF DOOM was one of my muses. On December 31, I was sitting in this room and looking at my phone, working too late, and I saw that he died. I had just gotten the phone, and I threw it on the ground. I took it really personally, which is super surprising because I just don't get into celebrity culture. But I had to say something about it because I felt like I hadn't expressed enough what MF DOOM meant to me. It made sense to do it as a comic book, because he does the whole supervillain schtick. He pulled from Marvel Comics, Saturday morning cartoons, and all that stuff. It seemed like a no-brainer.

She once broke into Doctor Doom’s stronghold while wearing an Iron Man suit.

Finnegans Wake is not a programme for revolution but, through its very form, a symbol of it, of moments of revolution in general and also of particular revolutionary moments. It may have seemed like a ‘genial proclamation of doom’, as Levin called it, on its first appearance but it reminds us also of the unremarked and even unremarkable but continuous revolts in being. There may be something idealistic about such an illustration of a revolution against tyranny, but such utopian and comic visions have something idealistic about them. In its visions, Finnegans Wake is neither normative nor prescriptive; it does not indicate how a utopian state can be brought about. But we imagine with it that at certain moments of history, and through certain ways of perceiving the world, a successful revolution can be thought of as something that does at least sometimes happen.

Jane: Cliff...Oh! The metal's warm, like skin. Look at me, Cliff. Listen. Love means nothing at all. Life means nothing at all. Cliff: What?

Lois Lane was part of the Superman dynamic from the very start. The intrepid star newspaper reporter had made her first appearance in 1938’s Action Comics #1, the same issue where Superman made his debut. She was infatuated with the powerful, godlike Superman, while repulsed by his meek pantywaist alter ego, her rival reporter Clark Kent. Lois’ 1940s persona of tough crusading reporter was in the mold of Hollywood dames like Rosalind Russell. Lois’ tireless effort to get her next headline, along with her impulsive personality, often put her in danger, from which Superman would have to rescue her. But the 40s Lois was no pushover. She was a modern career woman, and her dream was to get her greatest scoop: Superman’s secret identity. The Superman/Lois Lane relationship had many complicated factors that would prevent a romance from ever reaching fruition, while still providing the right tension to sustain the relationship for decades. First off, they were literally from different worlds. Superman was the last survivor of the doomed planet Krypton, and was raised by simple midwestern farm folk. Lois Lane was very much a woman of 20th century America: emancipated, headstrong, and unwilling to take “no” for an answer. Superman’s timid farm boy Clark Kent persona crumbled before Lois’ ferocious, emasculating temperament, while his heroic Man of Steel found himself constantly confounded by her impetuous nature. Meanwhile, the very issue of Superman’s secret identity always threw a wrench into his romance with Lois. Besides the basic duplicity, Superman becomes his own rival, squelching any chance for a healthy relationship. Superman loves Lois Lane, but tries to win her heart as meek Clark Kent, with the rationale that he wants to be sure Lois really loves him for himself, not for his glamorous superhuman persona. But since he’s created a wallflower persona that Lois will never find attractive, he sabotages any chance for love. Lois, for her part, is enamored with Superman, yet has a burning desire to discover his secret identity. Lois never considers that she risks losing Superman’s love if she learns his secret identity, or that the world may lose its champion and protector. (...) If the Lois Lane of the ’40s owed much to the tough talking heroines of that decade’s screwball comedies, the Lois of the ’50s was defined by the medium of the new era—television.