Face it, you hate every single boy on the face of the Earth!" "That's not TRUE, I just hate all these obnoxious, extroverted, pseudo-bohemian art-school losers

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.

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

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 a comic looks better in the magazine. The colors are designed to be on paper, not illuminated on screen. I don't like the aspect of people reading it for free. When people get things for free, they tend to not take them as seriously. But I don't know. I'm sure 10 times more people are reading it online than in the actual paper.

Even if I only had 10 readers, I'd rather do the book for them than for a million readers online.

Before I could read, I remember trying to piece together the stories from the images. It was a very primal experience.