There are certain comics that just seem like they have this perfect balance between dialogue and image that I can't not read. I'll want to save it for later, and the next thing I know, I'm reading it. That's what I'm kind of trying to do with my comics.

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'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.

As soon as I'm finished with it, it feels like an impersonal project. Like, "Well, I did another book."

I just try to make comics for myself, try to give it some kind of unity throughout. That often involves tiny details. I'm never sure what's going to be obvious or what nobody will ever notice. I put stuff in my comics that I thought was blatantly obvious, and nobody noticed. And things that I think are buried in the background, everybody gets it. So I try to be consistently aware of every part of the frame.

Often I'll do research just to get a time period correct, but I didn't have to for the '70s... I feel like I can close my eyes and still see it so clearly.

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.