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.

You have to find the tone of the piece and modulate that. There are ways to indicate that - I try to incorporate the biggest range I can within the story, going from humorous to serious without it being jarring. That's the hardest part, to keep that balance. It requires being constantly aware of where you are in the story. You can't really do that in a movie: You can't slightly modulate the tone by the way the character's eyeballs look in one certain scene.

I think that's what we're all most terrified about: that we'll just die and disappear and we'll leave no trace.

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 there was a point that I realized I could do what I wanted to do in terms of the drawing. I used to run around a lot of things. I would shy away from certain things that I realized would be horrible for me to draw, and just wouldn't be fun.

Avatar is a total nerd thing, and yet our popular culture has somehow made all that stuff acceptable.

I was a very fearful little kid, and I would always see the worst in everything. The glass was half-empty. I would see people kissing, and I would think one was trying to bite the other.