The secret to being alone is to organize your time; to develop habits and routines and gradually elevate their importance to where they seem almost like normal, healthy activities.
It’s much more liberating as a artist to feel like you can approach each page and each panel with the way that inspires you the most. I think the thing that bogs down a lot of artists is that you’re kind of stuck drawing in a style you’ve developed.
But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.
Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie.
Even if I only had 10 readers, I’d rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.
I really want people to read the book, and bookstores never sold an issue of Eightball because nobody knew what it was.
For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in ‘The Death-Ray’ is based on somebody I went to high school with.
For me, the whole process involves envisioning this book in my head as I’m working.
I don’t read much of anything online.
I try to only work on the screenplays for a few hours a day when I’m in my most voluble mood, just sort of writing whatever comes into my head. It’s a very freeing thing.
It’s embarrassing to be involved in the same business as the mainstream comic thing. It’s still very embarrassing to tell other adults that I draw comic books – their instant, preconceived notions of what that means.
I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It’s kind of a fine line.
I must have been 3 years old or less, and I remember paging through these comics, trying to figure out the stories. I couldn’t read the words, so I made up my own stories.
I feel like I understood the language of comics. I had a real fluidity with that medium at a very early age.
I try personally not to be nostalgic.
When you see somebody who’s got a complaining personality, it usually means that they had some vision of what things could be, and they’re constantly disappointed by that. I think that would be the camp that I would fall into – constantly horrified by the things people do.
In an art school it’s very hard to tell who is the best.
I believe in the transformative power of cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire.
I knew how to draw all of the different smokestacks on the old trains and all that stuff, and then I realized that if I can draw trains, which is the thing I was probably the least interested in in the world at the time, I can do anything and find a way into it that will be interesting.
But they always just laugh off everything I say, when really I want absolutely nothing more than to destroy the world they live in and to watch them suffer, alone and miserable, trying to live in my world for a change!