I became a degenerate artist. My parents were shaped by their own experiences, and artists weren't so useful in the death camps.

Right now anything made for the iPad is like performance art. I'm not interested in performance art. Comics are too hard to make to be done for such a passing blip. When it stabilizes, I'll look at it.

Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.

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."

I'm supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing.

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.

Some of the reviewers wanted less. Some wanted lots more. Some wanted lots more of something else. But these strips are exactly what they are.