I had thought comics could only be one thing, and that was what mainstream comics were selling us. And the undergrounders proved anything you had in your head, as long as you had the skill to put it down on paper, was fair game. And I started filling sketchbooks with my own comics.
I wanted to reinvent horror comics. I felt like it was my mission to open people’s eyes to the fact that horror comics could be so much more than the popular perception of them.
Horror is one of the few genres – romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind – that’s all emotion-driven. It’s not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It’s irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience.
I hate superheroes. I always hated superheroes. From the time I was a little kid, I could believe in a 50-foot gorilla trashing New York City before I could believe a guy would put on long tights and bat ears and go and fight crime. Like, the fantasy never made sense to me, on a basic level.
The power of monsters is, it is a way of giving almost tangible substance to fears, beliefs, things that aren’t real. You can coalesce it and draw it, or describe it, and it’s a monster.
If you have birds, or if you’re a herpetologist and raise reptiles – you look in those eyes, and there is nothing there that’s human. I mean, they don’t think like us, they don’t see the world like us.
When you’re making your living as a writer or an artist or a musician, you kind of live in a trance. You’re sort of in the day-to-day world, you’re certainly there for your day-to-day relationships with people, and so on.