Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of – I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.
Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn’t like that, but I read it anyhow.
Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?
People really want to think that these things really happened. I don’t know why that is important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.
Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.
I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn’t bear that it wasn’t real. She wanted to live in it.
I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity.
It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.
At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, “Mythology and Archetypal Experience,” confounded me. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then.
And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.
Well, I’m always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.
Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb’s stuff.
The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.
The web is my unconscious but it’s also a wish – a fantasy of what my own creativity might look like if I weren’t constantly impeding its flow.
Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.
I’m pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.
For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.
I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.
I love Jules Feiffer. I didn’t discover him until I was a little older.
It was not a triumphal return. Home, as I had known it, was gone.