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

I lose faith in everything else, but rarely in my work. If I start to get bored, I change it to make it more interesting. I try not to take it too seriously, but I also try to never cheat or hurry things along.

I really want people to read the book, and bookstores never sold an issue of Eightball because nobody knew what it was.

You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that [ the 70'th].

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'd always wanted to do a weekly strip, or a strip that was in installments like that. It's been fun trying to figure out how to make that work. Their standards are so prissy that they won't allow me to use all kinds of language. Not only can you not swear, this morning I was informed I couldn't use the word "schmuck." I couldn't use "crap," "schmuck," or "get laid." Those three were beyond the pale. But you get around that, and it comes out better. I can't quite explain why.