I wanted to reinvent horror comics. I felt like it was my mission to open people's eyes to the fact that horror comics could be so much more than the popular perception of them.

I, as a storyteller, was asking questions no one in science had apparently asked. What happens in a nest of tyrannosaurs? They're precocial, meaning when they hatch, they're ready to feed and move about. My questions are "Hmm, if there's a nest of tyrannosaurs, and there's three siblings that survive, would they try to eat each other?"

I had thought comics could only be one thing, and that was what mainstream comics were selling us. And the undergrounders proved anything you had in your head, as long as you had the skill to put it down on paper, was fair game. And I started filling sketchbooks with my own comics.

Horror is one of the few genres - romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind - that's all emotion-driven. It's not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It's irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience.

If we can't get more John Rovnaks in this world, let's all support the John Rovnak we've got.

When you're making your living as a writer or an artist or a musician, you kind of live in a trance. You're sort of in the day-to-day world, you're certainly there for your day-to-day relationships with people, and so on.

The power of monsters is, it is a way of giving almost tangible substance to fears, beliefs, things that aren't real. You can coalesce it and draw it, or describe it, and it's a monster.