As a cartoonist, my single goal is to create people with whom, for better or for worse - and regardless of how embarrassing it sounds - I can "fall in love" and somehow feel something deeply about, and through.

I think it has most to do with the way in which a story is told, whether it feels real either via the music of the telling or the honesty of the story.

My mother was always encouraging about my wanting to be an artist.

I wouldn't classify television as "cool," because to me anything that involves the reader's consciousness to drive and carry a story is an "active" medium, and anything that sort of just pours into the eyeballs and ears is the opposite.

There is something about the medium [in comics] that allows for a simulation of actual experience with the added benefit of actually reading. You're reading pictures, but you are also looking at them. It's a sort of combined activity that I can't really think of any other medium having, other than, say, a foreign film when you are reading and seeing. It allows for all sorts of associations that might not come up with just words or just pictures.

Storytelling is one of comics' esthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist's problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of "writing," the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience. As far as I'm concerned, that's really all I've been trying to do formally for the past decade or more with comics, and it's certainly time-consuming, since it has to be done with drawings, not words.

One of the things that appealed to me most about comics was that you can pick the ones you like and build your own personal pantheon.