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

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.

I see a lot of possibilities in the age of my characters - between 18 and 21. You have a window of opportunity when you leave your childhood behind and have this chance to become what you always wanted to be. For me, that was a time when I could have gone many different ways. I was in flux and deciding what kind of person I would become. There's something interesting about the vision of what that will be and the reality of making that happen, and how you really are what you are. Unless you're "in character," it's impossible to get around that.

I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols. The reader reads into them something worse than what you normally would have. They work as this outburst of incoherent anger. I've found ways to write around swearing that are much more effective, rather than going for what someone really would say.

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

It's hard to tell if anyone's interested in reading a serialized story. But it's interesting to put in a cliffhanger each week. That was popular in old comic strips. They'd write a weekend story different from the daily strip. So people follow one story day to day, and a separate story on weekends. If you read them, you think "I'll read two more." Then you're like "I gotta find out!" And you read 500 more.

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.