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 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 believe in the transformative power of cinema. It is only through this shared dream-experience that we can transcend the oppressive minutiae of daily existence and find some spiritual connection in the deeper reality of our mutual desire.

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

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

I try to employ a different strategy for each story. Often, I'll have a specific look in mind before I even have the story to go with it. I'm not so much interested in forcing the issue of reader identification through various graphic tricks. I'm more interested in creating specific characters that resonate with my own particular inner struggles.

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!