I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.

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.

Everybody just lets the media do their thinking for them... that's why you'll never hear any reggae on the radio!

Usually when I put together a book like this Death-Ray hardcover or that Ghost World special edition, then I have to reread it and see if there is anything I want to change or any re-coloring I want to do. That's when I'm faced with the actual work. When I'm working, I'm too close to it. I'm sort of inside, and I can't see it at all. So when I have that experience of rereading it years later, it's jarring.

That's been my main interest for the last 15 years, is to really make sure the story and the characters take precedence over everything else, and that I give them everything I can to make them exist as actual people.

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.

I think I'm gonna attach myself to the sinking ship that is book publishing.