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.

I don't like to be constrained to any one medium. I like to surprise and amuse - and indeed, torture - myself by weaving back and forth between images and words of all sorts, and trying to create work in the end that feels "of a piece." This is why I resist calling myself a "cartoonist." It doesn't seem to describe what I do.

Oddly enough, I suppose, I don't give much thought to my style, and I don't attempt to be consistent - except within a story. You ask if I struggled to find my style. It seems to me that style - in other words, a way of thinking and doing things - is innate. You can try to will it to be different, but it's like a signature - you can't change its fundamental nature.

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.

An artist's work is a synthesis of much more than the work of other creators.

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.