I think, to its credit, this is one of the last forms of popular entertainment that I don't sense to be discriminatory in any way. I think there's this general hunger for greater diversity, where publishers are really excited about finding different voices than what has been done.

It's psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you're trying to depict. You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.

Look, there's no denying that comics have moved dramatically into the mainstream in North American culture in the last 10 years, and for someone like me who's always tried to make a living at it, it's been great, I'm very grateful for it. But at the same time, it's not a subculture-y thing anymore; it's something that's in the New York Times and the New Yorker.

Especially for people of our generation, who really celebrated certain attitudes - the outsider, the loner - it can have a real impact on the art when they realize, I have friends, I'm married, or I have kids. That's certainly happened to me.

I get nervous about the effect that the high speed of everything will have on creativity. It's already sad for me to see that a lot of young aspiring cartoonists are putting stuff on the web, doing animation on the computer rather than making zines or mini-comics, which seem to be going the way of the dinosaur.

I think a lot of the criticism had to do with disliking the characters - which, again, I take as something of a compliment.

There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.