You need to be, like, turning down high-paying illustration work because you want to work on your comic. That's when you know you're doing something good.

But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.

It's much more liberating as a artist to feel like you can approach each page and each panel with the way that inspires you the most. I think the thing that bogs down a lot of artists is that you're kind of stuck drawing in a style you've developed.

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.

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.

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.

Face it, you hate every single boy on the face of the Earth!" "That's not TRUE, I just hate all these obnoxious, extroverted, pseudo-bohemian art-school losers