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.

For all the idealism that propels him through the story, if you read between the lines you may see that at a moment which he considers a defining point in his life as an activist, he's also set the stage for potential ugliness down the road.

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.

One of the things I really worry about is that if you don't see middle class wage growth, if you don't see the economy in certain areas of the country, the middle part of the country, starting to come back in the same way that it's doing especially well, let's say, in California or New York, then people are going to become politically frustrated.

But knowing that the world had come full circle to our Depression story didn't change the way we worked on it, or encourage us to change our thrust. I want people to be able to pick up this book in the future no matter what's going on in the world, and appreciate it on its own merits, not for any perceived winks at the headlines.

I really do think Trump's election comes down to respect. It comes down to being gracious. It comes down to really showing compassion for the problems of the black and Latino communities. And I really hope that Donald Trump takes the ball that's in his court and tries to go after those voters, tries to show some compassion, and really offers them something substantive to get excited about Republican and conservative policy.

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.