It's embarrassing to be involved in the same business as the mainstream comic thing. It's still very embarrassing to tell other adults that I draw comic books - their instant, preconceived notions of what that means.

I think a comic looks better in the magazine. The colors are designed to be on paper, not illuminated on screen. I don't like the aspect of people reading it for free. When people get things for free, they tend to not take them as seriously. But I don't know. I'm sure 10 times more people are reading it online than in the actual paper.

Certainly it's great to be able to talk to your friends about something. They might mention a film, and you can find all about it, and you don't have to wait months until you can find a book that might cover the subject and keep it in your head. You can have that kind of immediacy. But there's also something about it, where all the knowledge seems kind of fleeting. All the stuff I learn about in that way, I can be interested in for a day and then it's gone.

My feeling is that it's one of the very few things that comics can do that you really can't do in any other medium. I feel like the reader accepts all of these styles, and after a certain point you can flip the pages and see a character rendered very differently than you saw on an earlier page, and it's not jarring. It suggests things that you can't suggest just in the writing or in the plotting.

I've felt that in the past, where I just felt like I had to keep drawing in the same way to maintain this sameness and rhythm throughout an entire book, and it was not really necessary.

I tend to be the type who is overly polite and sort of ingratiating to other people.

Before I could read, I remember trying to piece together the stories from the images. It was a very primal experience.