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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.