I'm pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.

Drawing is more fun to me than writing. I think it's interesting to talk to different cartoonists about how those activities work for them. I'm a very writerly cartoonist. I certainly spend more time on the writing than I do on the drawing, even though the drawing, of course, is very time-consuming.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.

I still found literary criticism to be a suspect activity

I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.

I could not do what I do if I were not obsessive compulsive to a certain extent. I don't act clinically OCD. I'm not going to check things so many times I have to take drugs for it. But the kind of complicated and painstaking work I have to do to make my drawings, it just kind of harnesses that compulsive energy in a constructive way.

It certainly was an important moment for me, that realization that I was not going to get what I wanted. It was very freeing. I keep using that word "freeing" or "liberating." I feel like Houdini sometimes, like I'm just getting out of one set of shackles after another, hanging upside down inside a burlap bag with handcuffs on. Hopefully one day, I'm going to get out of this tank of water.