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.

I can't blame anyone for being pessimistic when they look around, after all the blood spilled and energy spent to gain ground for working people in the past, and see it all happening again. I wasn't pointing a finger when I wrote the book, but sometimes the message is there even when you aren't actively trying to be the messenger.

I'd forgotten how challenging comics can be until I started working on Ropes. Yes, you're restricted by the boundaries of the page, but we all work within technical limitations of some kind.

I used to pile on the detail, which was probably a way of hedging my bets while I was working out my own way of doing things. I've cut it back over the years, but some of the descriptions can still be still pretty dense. So the answer is somewhere between fairly detailed and maybe too detailed. Fortunately, people are seeing the final pages and not my raw script.

The issue that's really, really concerning is that you have eight million prime age men who have dropped out of the labor force, folks who aren't even looking for work. You can create job growth all day, but unless you start to do the things that bring those labor force dropouts back into the job market, you're not going to solve the problems.

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.