Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.

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.

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 don't know how comic artists feed their families, if they do. But it's a fascinating form and so I think that after a long period of nothing happening and work, nothing very impressive, we are into another golden age of comics. Unfortunately, it's not a golden age for the artists themselves economically. I don't know how they get along.

There's no rap against comics that isn't true. They were sexist, they were racist, you name it - and they kind of gloried in that.

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.

We want playmates we can own.