I don’t believe that comics are a medium well suited to being quoted. To my mind, not even the most famous comic book lines are truly “quotable.” Quip-able, maybe. Not hard to reference, to be sure. But quotable? Worth inscribing on a statue or a plaque? Not really.
“With great power comes great responsibility?” Hardly even senior quote material.
“I hate Mondays?” Best left to office workers and spree killers.
“Up, up, and away?” Better than any Batman quote, at least.
That said, if I had to name a few candidates for quote-mining, my top two would be:
Watchmen.
Calvin and Hobbes.
Watchmen, of course is an easy one to praise, but deservedly so. The general quality of the work aside, (we are looking for quotes, after all,) Rorschach lines are typically memorable, (although, if we would settle for hardboiled pastiche, there are other comics that do it just as well.) Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan have some good ones, (especially easily quotable in comic book discussions.) At the very least the supplementary material between chapters might be divided into some quotient of quote-ables. Even so, I can’t think of any quotes I would call historically significant. Maybe there are some good ones in Moore’s run on Swamp Thing…
Calvin and Hobbes, at first consideration seems like it would be a gold mine for quotes. After all, who ever wrote a more thoughtful comic strip than Bill Watterson? No one *cough* Charles Schultz *cough* that’s who! Certainly, no other comic strip inspired more students to major in philosophy! (Hey, better than what happened to the kids who grew up reading Prince Valiant.) And yet, here I am trying to come up with something Calvin said, or that Hobbes said, or that, uh, Susie said, that I would like tattooed on my forehead or carved into my tombstone, and I am drawing a blank. Calvin’s dad had all the best lines anyway.
Sorry folks, but comics and quotes just don’t go that well together. Honestly, I think the best comic writers know this. You can always tell when a writer is trying to be quotable, and boy does it stink. In comics, writing and visuals have to work together, and when you twist the two apart in order to get a quote, well, you get more of a reference really.
Maybe if Mark Twain ever wrote a comic book, he could have pulled it off.
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