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

I just try to make comics for myself, try to give it some kind of unity throughout. That often involves tiny details. I'm never sure what's going to be obvious or what nobody will ever notice. I put stuff in my comics that I thought was blatantly obvious, and nobody noticed. And things that I think are buried in the background, everybody gets it. So I try to be consistently aware of every part of the frame.

You need to be, like, turning down high-paying illustration work because you want to work on your comic. That's when you know you're doing something good.

I love the medium and I love individual comics, but the business is nothing I would be proud of.

My feeling is that it's one of the very few things that comics can do that you really can't do in any other medium. I feel like the reader accepts all of these styles, and after a certain point you can flip the pages and see a character rendered very differently than you saw on an earlier page, and it's not jarring. It suggests things that you can't suggest just in the writing or in the plotting.

Film is a director's medium, and a film set is a complicated military structure - I have to keep reminding myself to stay in my place, or all will burst into chaos.

For me, the whole process involves envisioning this Ghost World comic book in my head as I'm working.