Surely comics require more effort on the part of the reader than movies or television. I'm always learning new things you can do with comics that wouldn't work in any other medium, and often they require the need to process a lot of dense information. Of course, the trick is to make the complicated seem effortless and spontaneous.

Usually when I put together a book like this Death-Ray hardcover or that Ghost World special edition, then I have to reread it and see if there is anything I want to change or any re-coloring I want to do. That's when I'm faced with the actual work. When I'm working, I'm too close to it. I'm sort of inside, and I can't see it at all. So when I have that experience of rereading it years later, it's jarring.

I was thinking the other day that there will never be another form of music that everybody has to respond to - like disco.

When I go back and reread the stuff, I'm always floored by how deeply personal and revealing it actually is.

At a certain point, I realized that I could draw anything, and there was nothing I should avoid - I could make it work. That's opened me up to being able to be much more comfortable telling any kind of story.

I feel like I understood the language of comics. I had a real fluidity with that medium at a very early age.

You have to find the tone of the piece and modulate that. There are ways to indicate that - I try to incorporate the biggest range I can within the story, going from humorous to serious without it being jarring. That's the hardest part, to keep that balance. It requires being constantly aware of where you are in the story. You can't really do that in a movie: You can't slightly modulate the tone by the way the character's eyeballs look in one certain scene.