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."

All I can say on the Guilford story - and this comes more from my perspective as a father than an artist - is for parents and administrators to give so little value to the career of a public-school teacher - to allow him to be cast aside without exhausting every avenue to resolve the issue - is an obscenity worse than anything I've ever drawn in my comics.

I think I've had the fantasy of a ray-gun that could erase the world from the time I was a very little kid.

At a certain point, I realized that I could draw anything, and there was nothing I should avoid - I could make it work. That's opened me up to being able to be much more comfortable telling any kind of story.

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.

It's a challenge to express real life in dramatic terms. In an entirely "made-up" story, you are sometimes overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities.

I feel like I understood the language of comics. I had a real fluidity with that medium at a very early age.