"What keeps this industry alive is creators doing their own work. Once you change a costume or origin enough times, it's a dead body — you're just electrocuting it and keeping it sort of shambling on. There is a lot more creator-owned stuff now, and some of it I look at and go, 'Oh, that's his pitch for a TV show. That's his pitch for a movie. That's him saying oh, this kind of thing sells.' I didn't do that. My one piece of advice to people who are saying "'I wanna do it, but DC and Marvel pay so well ...' is that in between your big paying gigs, just find time just to do one comic! It doesn't have to be a 6,000-page epic! It doesn't have to be Hellboy! Ten years down the road, when you're scrambling for work or drawing some book you hate, at least you did something when you had fire in your belly that's really you."

-- Mike Mignola, discussing creator-owned comics and what's kept him interested in Hellboy for the past 20 years