It's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.

It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.

Just in terms of being able to be a professional artist, but also it's nice to not have to dread introductions. "What you do for a living?" It used to be easier just to tell people that I was a magazine illustrator than try to explain that I did comics, but not the kind of comics that they were used to, and no, it's not pornography, etc. And now people even of our parents' generation are familiar with the term "graphic novel," which is kind of amazing.

I wanted all the responsibility to rest on the content of the story. I tried to make the visual style almost invisible.

If something's a little weird, it's Kafkaesque.

There are certain artists and filmmakers who, I get the impression, are trying to show off how bad their characters can be, how immoral their characters can be.

When people see me struggling on paper, I think it invites an almost collaborative relationship with the outside world, and that includes readers and other artists.