If I was feeling angry, I had to investigate not just who or what I was angry at, but why. And then I had to do the hard part and ask myself: Are you justified in where your anger is being directed? So, while I allowed my emotions to be valid, I knew that if I were to use them constructively, in the service of art, then I had to look at them dispassionately. Some might call this therapy, and I suppose it was. But I also had a goal that was larger than just healing myself, which was connecting to an audience.

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

I like working in series, so instead of just doing one separate body of work, what if I come up with a different rhythm, instead of every week, what if I make it every year? And so I'm still setting up a series, a repetition, but it's a completely different work flow.

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 is so outlandish. I call it absurdist fiction, because the story is utter hyperbole. The story builds to such an exaggerated and ridiculous pitch that there's no way it can be true - and yet, because it's based on the current cultural climate, it feels as if it is.

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

Our job is to translate the lies, deceit, and anxiety that poisons our cultural water supply into an understandable form that we can digest.