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

I was very aware of the fact that there are a lot of comics out there that I love, because I've grown up my whole life reading comics and I know every little nuance of the language and all the implications.

Maybe you're not even in a position to really judge how good your kid is at that endeavor.

For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy who was trying to be cool by writing about young people and a certain kind of Bay Area culture that I was tangentially a part of.

I think there's a lot of evolution that's happened in intangible ways, in terms of how I think about the work or how I plan it out.

I sense a real difference in my work from the time I was younger and single and more involved in the world of music and going out to bars and all that. There were points at which I was trying to use my art to reflect positively on myself, to almost be flirtatious through the work.

When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.