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.

I guess we all make choices as to how we want to live, right?

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.

I guess I just don't like being physically in front of people I don't know very well, because I expect to be "seen through," or, even worse, instantly hated.

Even the disappointing diffusion of a sheer curtain can suggest the most colorful bouquet of unspeakable secrets.

Cartooning is an artistic commitment that requires the full attention and passion of the artist on every level; one should not get into it if one expects to do anything more than produce a book or a story that is exactly as one wants it to be.

Whereas in a memory you edit things out and sort of restructure the things to seem a little bit more heroic, or to focus on particular aspects that magnify or reduce certain things.