There are many people who get beat up, who suffer, who are victimized, and then they sit down to write and they write crap. How many of these graphic novels over the years are from really talented people? Most of them actually, if you look at them, are self-pitying confessionals about "poor me".

I was never interested in the two-party system per se. I was interested in how authority was abused by government, and how lies were told, and rewritten, to seem to be true. I came up out of a tradition of radical journalism.

I think we overrate experience and what we've been through in terms of our success at doing the work we do. There are many people who get beat up, who suffer, who are victimized, and then they sit down to write and they write crap.

And all the things I thought were mistakes and I did cartoons on them. And then I think I was the first cartoonist in the country to attack the war in Viet Nam and that helped influence a whole generation of young cartoonists who later on took up the battle. And that was exciting to know that I had helped influence work of young people who were moving this forum into a better and more exciting area, out of the more by the state that political cartooning had been in.

The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.

When you do the kind of work I do, everything is challenging, but probably the most challenging thing is getting up in the morning and getting on with it because it's so easy to stay in bed and not get on with it.

I come out of a Cold War sensibility, a Cold War mentality, and during those Cold War years, I used to know, I thought, the answers to everything. And since the end of the Cold War, I'm just a dumb as everyone else.