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 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.

I did a lot of work with early 20th century attitudes, the kind of superficial notions and behavior that prompt people who don't know history very well to think that "people were different back then" - but beneath all that are characters who react in ways that we can all recognize, and will always be able to recognize.

What a lot of folks feel - and some of the other commenters have mentioned this - is that there isn't a very clear way for somebody who's working-class, who is middle-income to really get ahead in 21st century America. That implicates our education system. It also implicates our local and regional economies. And I think that folks will expect Trump to fix a lot of those things. But, of course, it's a really tall order, and it's not going to happen overnight.

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.

There is a need for more economic growth, for more job growth. But there is a need in some people for them to recognize that they have a role in making these problems better. And we can't - we can't ignore that.

My personal beliefs were shaped more by experience and by watching the news when I was young: images of angelic-looking college students in Mississippi crying like the world was ending because black people were being allowed on their campus; the slow mounting horror of Vietnam on the evening news every night; sitting with my parents in front of the TV and being appalled at the way the Chicago police were treating the protesters during the '68 Democratic convention. Being eyed with suspicion because of my age and the way I wore my hair.