I actually start drawing things. Usually they're abandoned before I commit too much time and effort.

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

There are certain things in there that no one else would recognize, really. I see details of my life that I didn't even intend to put in when I was doing the work. 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.

One of my weekend hobbies is to go look at old houses when there are open houses around here. Just to go look at the architecture. And you can see how many houses were built around 1977, the year where everyone said, "Let's put in these aluminum windows instead of beautiful hand-made wood ones."

Something I always wanted to do, to capture that later half of the '70s. It's like the early half of the '70s is still the '60s, in that there's still kind of a playfulness and inventiveness in terms of design and the things that were going on in the culture. The second half, it got much more commodified. It's possibly the ugliest era of architecture and clothes and design in the entire 20th century, from 1975 to '81 or '82.

You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

If I could have somehow been the kind of artist who could crank out two or three issues a year, that's different. That's sort of what it's all about, to get this thing out so that there's some kind of continuity. But to do a comic book every year or two was just so anti-climactic.