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

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.

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.

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.

One of the by-products of being allowed to start my professional career prematurely is that the evolution of my work is really evident.

Underground and alternative comics existed in a vacuum for years, where money really wasn't an issue. No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.

For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.