It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy... Let's go exploring!

Each kind of story has its own problems in writing, but my main concern really is to keep the reader on his toes, or to keep the strip unpredictable. I try to achieve some sort of balance between the two that keeps the reader wondering what's going to happen next and be surprised.

A box of new crayons! Now they’re all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect. Soon they’ll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors. Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic.

Calvin: Know what I pray for? Hobbes: What? Calvin: The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can't, and the incapacity to tell the difference.

Saturday morning cartoons do that now, where they develop the toy and then draw the cartoon around it, and the result is the cartoon is a commercial for the toy and the toy is a commercial for the cartoon. The same thing's happening now in comic strips; it's just another way to get the competitive edge. You saturate all the different markets and allow each other to advertise the other, and it's the best of all possible worlds. You can see the financial incentive to work that way. I just think it's to the detriment of integrity in comic strip art.

Animation, by necessity, is a team sport, and the fewer people with input into my work, the better I like it.

Even if lives did hang in the balance, it would depend on whose they were.