Eventually, if it's on your mind, you stumble on it. You need a certain amount of luck and persistence.

Cartoons were very conservative. The country was very conservative. Although the liberals were allegedly in charge for a long time, there was a very acceptable balance what people would talk about in public. And I wanted to stretch those and move further out. And as the civil rights movement began, I started doing cartoons on that and on sit-ins and I was, along with Bill Mauldin, a great cartoonist out of World War II, arguably one of two white cartoonists doing this kind of work, Bill and me.

I told the doctor I was overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively active, constantly depressed, with recurring fits of paranoia. Turns out I'm normal.

I seemed to have instinctually a strong idea of how the strip had to be written from the beginning. That changed too, but it was more in the direction of where it was headed. I didn't have a clue as to the drawing style, because the drawing style that I was groomed on from the beginning was newspaper comic strips, which were much more conventional.

My success was the shock of recognition, probably, rather than the quality of the work. I mean, the quality may have been fine, but there's a lot of fine work out there. It was the fact that I was doing something that at that time, nobody else was doing, except for say, Mort Saul out in San Francisco on The Hungry Eye, and "Second City" was emerging out in Chicago. Nothing in print. It was basically happening in cabaret and nothing in fiction. And certainly nothing in New York in cartoons.

I'm not sure about that role any longer. The role used to be to mix things up and I think to a great extent it still is, but the quality of the work of the political cartoon has been succeeded by the wisecrack, the gag cartoon, so that the cartoonist becomes more of the equivalent of the Jay Leno monologues, or David Letterman monologues.

I've never met a cartoonist who isn't quirky or weird in some ways.