Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.

She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.

Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.

What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.

Mike Judge, who I've become friends with over the years never took himself seriously as an artist.

Unfortunately what came out of it was also kind of an imitation community with a lot of mindless conformity.