I feel like a lot of my aesthetic was in response to feeling the awfulness and cheapness of that [ the 70'th].

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.

I'm always looking for things I imagine must exist, but don't - this is usually the impetus to create that thing myself.

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 can look at my early work and see what a pained struggle it was to draw what I was drawing. I was trying so hard to get this specific look that was in my head, and always falling short.

You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn't really have. A photograph, even if it's connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.

For example, I noticed that every single kid in the high school in 'The Death-Ray' is based on somebody I went to high school with.