My two biggest influences are Archie comics and Dennis the Menace.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. I always wanted to pursue either music or comics, so when the opportunity came from comics publisher Fantagraphics for my brothers Jaime and Mario and I to make a comic book together, we jumped at the chance: "Let's just do it and see what happens." Really, we weren't sure where we were going to go with it. We thought our work was good enough to be out there, but we didn't know that the response was going to be pretty good, pretty quick.

If a good cartoonist can make a living making his comics, he'll continue to do that; the lesser insincere cartoonist that gets a lot of press will fall by the wayside eventually.

I've always been interested in the way males seem to need to start clubs, or cults, to keep girls out until they need them for sex. It comes from some weird immature tribal crap, I'm sure.

I get to draw what I like to draw, basically people hangin' around, and write very humanistic kinds of situations and characters. But I do also like to draw adventure stories - more in terms of drawing them than writing them - and letting my imagination go wild.

Anyone could identify with the human aspect of the characters.

In the old days, I just could not leave characters alone. Now I just try to keep the ones that still have something in the way of stories to tell.