Understand, my own politics aren't necessarily interchangeable with what any of my characters believe. You could take each of the characters in On the Ropes, and I'd probably be in sympathy with a different one on any given day, depending on what's going on in the world.

I think that what was genius about the politics of Trump's campaign is that he focused on workers and he focused on jobs. It wasn't about the wealthy entrepreneur with a private jet. It wasn't about a government handout. It was about the folks in the middle.

The idea wasn't to make a direct political statement since the current economic collapse hadn't begun when we started on the book. The parallels I'm most interested in are the ways that human nature never changes, no matter how far back in time you look.

There's a certain pressure you put on yourself to use the comics page to full advantage that can focus your mind to a pinpoint, and when the juices are flowing, that's incredibly exciting. When you've managed to fit a complex set of actions or a complicated emotional passage into a single page there's the sense of satisfaction that I suspect a sculptor gets from chipping away at a piece of stone and ending up with a fully-realized work of art.

I've been asked if I'd consider doing Ropes as a straight novel - which is flattering, I suppose - but I can't imagine why I'd want to limit myself that way. There's a certain immediacy we gain from that specific image of Fred being struck by a revelation, of those union workers appearing from the shadows in an alley, of a lonely woman wondering for just a moment if she should make a pass at this young man in her hotel room

Well, I think it's just remarkable how wrong the conventional wisdom was. It was utterly shocking that Donald Trump won to people who live on the coasts, but to people who live in the areas that I come from, it was utterly predictable. And that suggests something really, really broken about our political culture.

If you think of- of the rhetoric of - of modern Democrats, it's often so focused on government that people don't accept - I think a lot of those - a lot of folks on the left don't appreciate that - that people don't want a handout. They don't want government support and they don't, from the right, want people to talk about the noble entrepreneur.