But they always just laugh off everything I say, when really I want absolutely nothing more than to destroy the world they live in and to watch them suffer, alone and miserable, trying to live in my world for a change!

I can look at my early work and see what a pained struggle it was to draw what I was drawing. I was trying so hard to get this specific look that was in my head, and always falling short.

I used to use cigarettes to indicate somebody's an outsider a lot. It gave character a seedy, disreputable, almost suicidal quality. Now cigarettes are so unused - - you can't have anybody indoors smoking. If you drew that in a restaurant, you'd have to have a panel where the manager comes over and kicks them out. Unless it's set in Europe, you can't really do that. Characters who smoke - - it dates comics, somehow.

I love the medium and I love individual comics, but the business is nothing I would be proud of.

For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in 'The Death-Ray' is based on somebody I went to high school with.

I never feel there's anything I can't do with comics. There are certain things in comics that you can't do in any other medium: for instance, in Mister Wonderful, Marshall's narration overlaps the events as they're going on. That would be difficult in film; you could blot speech out with a voiceover, but it wouldn't have the same effect. That's always of interest, to see what new things you can do in comics form.

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.