I'll confess right here that I secretly wish I'd have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger, going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.

I drew the last image ever of Opus at midnight while Puccini was playing and I got rather stupid. Thirty years. A bit like saying goodbye to a child - which is ironic because I was never, never sentimental about him as many of his fans were.

The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I'd wanted to do.

That's the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.

It was a huge challenge to learn digital painting well enough so that computers don't pop into mind when one sees one.

I don't get fan mail. It disappeared with the digital revolution.

I happen to think nearly everybody - especially those one might find in the odd issue of 'People' magazine, including me - is frightfully boring, especially me. And Tom Cruise. Tom and I are alike in only this way.