With any work worth its salt, you have to trust the author enough to take its measure. And if you apply too many preconceptions, you are not taking its measure.

There's a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It's not just an exorcism.

Even on the iPad or the Kindle, when reading a book, you're rewarded for pressing a button - it's almost as if it were a Pavlovian thing. There's a little action that happens. And that there's always a little pump of adrenaline that happens. But that pump is different when you're lifting a page as if it was a curtain in a theater to show you another thing.

In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It's vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my OWN childhood vividly; I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn't let the adults *know* I knew... it would scare them.

Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.

I think as soon as I figured out - and this must have been incredibly young - that comic books were made by humans, rather than being natural phenomenon likes trees or rocks, I just wanted to be one of the people who did that. So I was copying all kinds of cartoons that I was reading, comic books, and eventually learned how to draw cartoon books step-by-step and just, I don't know, I'm not an especially quick learner, but I sure was a dedicated one.

Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." ...On the other hand, he SAID it.