I have a preponderance to look smug in photos; something to do with the way my mouth turns up at the corners.

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.

A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.

I arrived at my way of "working" as a way of visually approximating what I feel the tone of fiction to be in prose versus the tone one might use to write biography; I would never do a biographical story using the deliberately synthetic way of cartooning I use to write fiction. I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I "draw," which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world.

Fundamentally, I have no idea how the world works, though I am trying to figure it out.

Well, there are better cartoonists now than there ever have been. I firmly believe that. There's some amazing work being done.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.