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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.