Certainly it's great to be able to talk to your friends about something. They might mention a film, and you can find all about it, and you don't have to wait months until you can find a book that might cover the subject and keep it in your head. You can have that kind of immediacy. But there's also something about it, where all the knowledge seems kind of fleeting. All the stuff I learn about in that way, I can be interested in for a day and then it's gone.

I started drawing at a very young age. Writing a story wasn't satisfying, but to actually draw our own world - it's like controlling your own dreams.

If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.

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!

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.

It keeps me moving when I see people doing stuff that I see as "my" direction. I think, "Oh, it's been tainted. Now I've got to do something new." There's nothing worse than working on your own stuff and thinking that someone else is following you along.

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.