You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn’t really have. A photograph, even if it’s connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.
In a movie, you have to be mindful that no budget is going to be able to deal with running around the globe at every whim of the writer.
At a certain point, I realized that I could draw anything, and there was nothing I should avoid – I could make it work. That’s opened me up to being able to be much more comfortable telling any kind of story.
I’m not opposed to comics on the Internet. It’s just not interesting to me.
I’m a fan of parchment and wood pulp.
I’m more interested in characters who are a little difficult.
I think there was a point that I realized I could do what I wanted to do in terms of the drawing. I used to run around a lot of things. I would shy away from certain things that I realized would be horrible for me to draw, and just wouldn’t be fun.
I was 30 before I made a living that was not embarrassing.
I think that’s what we’re all most terrified about: that we’ll just die and disappear and we’ll leave no trace.
I think I’ve had the fantasy of a ray-gun that could erase the world from the time I was a very little kid.
Though to the average person that you’ll meet on an airplane, if you tell them you draw comics, they’ll still have sort of the same response – not like that’s seeped into the culture at large, that comics are not just for kids.
I tend to be the type who is overly polite and sort of ingratiating to other people.
I had no television when I was little, just a stack of old, beat-up comics from the 1950s and 1960s.
I never feel there’s anything I can’t do.
I can look at my early work and see what a pained struggle it was to draw what I was drawing. I was trying so hard to get this specific look that was in my head, and always falling short.
You need to be, like, turning down high-paying illustration work because you want to work on your comic. That’s when you know you’re doing something good.
That’s been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.
I have cultivated a little crew of people whose opinions I understand. It’s like the way you’d follow certain film critics because you know what their criteria are, and you may not agree with them, but you can glean from their opinion how you will feel about a film.
There are certain comics that just seem like they have this perfect balance between dialogue and image that I can’t not read. I’ll want to save it for later, and the next thing I know, I’m reading it. That’s what I’m kind of trying to do with my comics.
I was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to – like disco.