I always had more allergies toward the superhero comics than the others. I thought those were aimed more toward the people who would beat me up.

On September 11 one of the messages on our answering machine was from The New Yorker saying get down here right away for a special issue we'll be doing. That seemed so irrelevant to me, considering the cataclysm. I went to my studio for a while and I was processing the news. Because when we were in the thick of it, it just felt like Mars Attacks!, Is Paris Burning?, and I had no perspective. For a while, I thought I should go down and look for bodies. At the same time, since The New Yorker was looking for images, I thought, "Well, I'm more trained to look for images than for bodies."

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.

Instead of yelling at a TV set, I get to talk.

I think a lot of America turned to art and culture after Sept. 11. I know the sales of bibles went shooting up, but so did the sales of poetry. I think in a crisis one looks to one's culture, partially to give validation to why one would want that culture to survive.

I live in my own bubble. I was looking for an audience that wouldn't necessarily be looking for escapism when they came to my comics.

If you're going to visit and re-visit a book, it has more reason to be a real book, because of that ability to concentrate and that relationship that you build up with it, as opposed to the relationship that you build up with your screen, rewards replacement.