The experience of reading a comic should not be the time it takes to turn each page.

A lot of the kinship that people notice is not coincidental. I was very impressionable and trying to find my role models when I was twelve or thirteen.

I certainly wasn't consciously hiding my identity in the earlier work, though a lot of people have brought up the fact that I drew myself without eyeballs.

I was just a guy who did adult or alternative comic books. And then suddenly to be, like, a New Yorker cover artist was a different thing.

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.

Basically, I know there's no turning back the clock, and it's sort of pointless to mourn what has passed, but I don't know if the alternatives now really replicate the learning experience that I had, in terms of what I gained from making mini-comics. There were certain components of it that are completely gone because of being able to just throw stuff up on your blog the minute you're done with it.

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