I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.

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.

I think I have a very clear vision of what I want things to look like.

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.

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.

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.

Writing screenplays is very freeing from what you can do in comics in a lot of ways. You can change things around. I can take great delight in writing 40 pages, then just pressing delete and getting rid of it and not thinking about it ever again. Whereas in comics, if I had put that kind of effort into it, I couldn't go on.