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.

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 try to employ a different strategy for each story. Often, I'll have a specific look in mind before I even have the story to go with it. I'm not so much interested in forcing the issue of reader identification through various graphic tricks. I'm more interested in creating specific characters that resonate with my own particular inner struggles.

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

I feel like I understood the language of comics. I had a real fluidity with that medium at a very early age.

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

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.