I'm really happiest living life 22 pages at a time and putting things in little boxes on pages.

It was interesting looking back at the '80s and trying to find newspaper headlines from the time - the cliché of history repeating itself.

As you get older you start to see these events and leaders, and movements of the pendulum swinging back.

I genuinely am sort of an emotionally stunted man-child, so if I just write to the top of my intelligence, it sounds like a teenager. I like being around teenagers. It's good for drama; they feel everything much more intensely than adults do, their lives are much more interesting than ours. They're mutants. They have these weird bodies that are rebelling against them and changing every day. Teenagers always equal good drama.

There's a lot of fiction from that period that we're nostalgic for.

Fans of my books have just been supremely nice.

I write the book for one person — for Fiona [Staples, the artist]. I spend a lot of time just thinking how she'll react to things and manipulating her into drawing perverse, horrific things. It's a really weird job but I enjoy it.