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

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.

It's not an accident that, while bookstores are all in a tizzy, one of the more lively and alive sections is the so-called "graphic novel" section, because those are harder to replace.

Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn't meant to convince anybody of anything.

Comics can be pernicious, fascist propaganda or anti-authoritarian. The ones that shaped me were particularly anti-authoritarian.

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."

Style is a capitalist invention. It's a trademark. It's very useful in the world of commerce to have a good trademark, but it wasn't my first concern. I got restless