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.

I see a lot of possibilities in the age of my characters - between 18 and 21. You have a window of opportunity when you leave your childhood behind and have this chance to become what you always wanted to be. For me, that was a time when I could have gone many different ways. I was in flux and deciding what kind of person I would become. There's something interesting about the vision of what that will be and the reality of making that happen, and how you really are what you are. Unless you're "in character," it's impossible to get around that.

It's hard to tell if anyone's interested in reading a serialized story. But it's interesting to put in a cliffhanger each week. That was popular in old comic strips. They'd write a weekend story different from the daily strip. So people follow one story day to day, and a separate story on weekends. If you read them, you think "I'll read two more." Then you're like "I gotta find out!" And you read 500 more.

Though to the average person that you'll meet on an airplane, if you tell them you draw comics, they'll still have sort of the same response - not like that's seeped into the culture at large, that comics are not just for kids.

The greatest moment of my life was, somebody sent me a cable-access show from Chicago that had Joey Ramone on it showing the video we made together. And he was talking about, like, "This guy Dan Clowes postponed his wedding for us. He's a great guy."

I'm not opposed to comics on the Internet. It's just not interesting to me.

I never know if a book is crazy or not. There's that fear - this is the one that will end it all.