I didn't struggle to find my style - I prefer to call it "voice," because I think the word is more suggestive of complexity, implying quality of form and content. I do, however, struggle with making my work "work," and there's no predicting whether this can be achieved calmly or with a ferocious evisceration of the psyche.

Underground comics were produced by individuals - they were the auteur variety, rather than the production-line sort of comic book aimed at pleasing a vast general audience. Mainstream comics never appealed to me: they seemed sterile in their stylistic consistency, and were quickly consumed, the stories interesting only for so long as you were reading them.

I didn't struggle to find my style - I prefer to call it "voice," because I think the word is more suggestive of complexity, implying quality of form and content. I do, however, struggle with making my work "work," and there's no predicting whether this can be achieved calmly or with a ferocious evisceration of the psyche.

Most comics are not truly rebellious or creatively free. Most comics, paintings, music, etc., are derivative of other, more successful works. And it's quite often that those without much rebellious spirit are the ones to imitate it. Genuine radical expression is hard to come by, but it usually crops up when money is not a motivating factor. You can take all the liberties you want when someone else's dime is not at stake. The validation is not a threat to comics. A far greater threat to the creative freedom of artists working in any medium is self-consciousness and self-censorship.

Whatever they are, can Comics be "Art"? Of course they can. The "Art" in a piece is something independent of genre, form, or material. My feeling is that most paintings, most films, most music, most literature and, indeed, most comics fail as "Art." A masterpiece in any genre, form or material is equally "good." It's ridiculous to impose a hierarchy of value on art. The division between high and low art is one that cannot be defended because it has no correlation to aesthetic response.

Comics are a "young" art form, and there is much confusion as to how to treat them. Images have more immediate impact than words, and it is not every reader who can be convinced to relax into experiencing the work for what it is - not words and pictures, but a different form, where the narrative is propelled by the blending of image, word and sequence, and where no element can be extricated and have the same meaning by itself. When this art is shown in a gallery, its "thingness" is called to attention, it is no longer experienced as "story," but rather as an artifact of the artist's process.

Underground comics were striking in that they seemed largely unedited - in a typical book, with stories by five to ten creators, some stories would be shockingly bad, and others would be startlingly brilliant. This was a lively and exciting combination. The artwork and stories, good and bad, were all so different - I'd stare at the pages and lose track of time. This was a world where anything could happen, and I wanted to go there.