In hard times, beauty can seem frivolous - but take it away, and all you're left with is hard times.

In hard times, beauty can seem frivolous - but take it away, and all you're left with is hard times.

We've become to living with absurdity, and that to make people to see how much so, I had to ratchet up the insanity.

What I am most proud of with the book On to the Next Dream is how I turned an intensely emotional experience into art. Anyone can run up to a rooftop, tear off their clothes, and scream about how screwed up the world is. But for the people down below, all they see is a person losing their mind. I wanted to make something that channeled that emotion in a way that elicited an empathetic response from the reader. So that after you read this book, you would want to run up to the rooftop and scream about how screwed up the world is.

We tear ourselves inside out for something the world may love, then base our worth on that.

The thing about how that process works is that it's more about the editing and time for judging the ideas. Most pieces I publish each week have been around for months. This is a response to the beginning of the strip, when I was making them so quickly. I would just conceive a piece, finish it, and then the next day see it in the paper. That was when I was doing dailies four days a week.

On to the Next Dream became about much more than me facing a challenging situation; it became about how all of us feel when we're thrust unexpectedly into change. It's about how we all hold onto personalized visions of our lives, our city, and our culture, and what we do when reality forces us to confront the impermanence of those visions.