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

As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.

Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory.

I think cartooning gets at, and re-creates on the page, some sixth sense ... in a way no other medium can.

Comics are not a genre, but a developing language.

I don't trust art that promises a 24-hour joyride. In fact, there seems to be a modern sense of entitlement for such constant "ups," which is a repugnant attitude any way one chooses to look at it. I definitely believe in the possibility of happiness, though; it's just something that I think, rightfully, is rare in its genuine form, and that it can't be counterfeited.

I don't think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures - I don't illustrate the story with the pictures.