If I had to rank my skills, I have a long way to go before I can write a good graphic novel.

Anyway, I tried liking Jimmy Corrigan but I couldn't.

Over time, however, the endless war in Iraq began to play a role in natural selection. Only idiots signed up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared.

That's what comics journalism does better than anything else: you can get a feeling of what it was like. Like Scott McCloud says, especially with a simple drawing style, you can project yourself into the image, and imagine yourself having those experiences.

What people don't seem to ever understand is that any infrastructure that exists under your regime, in your current government, will be appropriated and inherited by the next regime. I mean, the KGB came out of the NKVD which came out of the Tsarist version of the same thing. And now, the FSB operates out of the old KGB building in Moscow. The infrastructure remains exactly the same. There's a little bit of reshuffling of personnel, and that's it. The way to make sure that there's no FSB today would have been for the Tsar to not have built an infrastructure for it in the 1800s.

I would like to fire every cop in America and start from scratch. We don't need as many of them, and the whole model of policing is completely off the rails. For the most part, the police are engaged in very little protection of the public. That's probably 5 percent of what they do. The rest of it is writing tickets.

Orrin Hatch was the keynote speaker at the last meeting of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He sought me out because he was a fan. I was thinking he had confused me with someone else.