Up until 1995, I still had a day job that I hated. I was still personally involved in things in the 90s.

Silk Road to Ruin has all the analysis and it's structured very well. I rely on my notes more and I use direct quotes. But there's nothing like writing about it right away.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

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.

Here in the US, we've built this insane infrastructure of oppression. When it's not run by a Barack Obama - who, by the way, I don't think is a perfect president - but by someone who is off-kilter, like a Carly Fiorina, that could be dangerous.

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.

There was an honorable tradition of using anonymous sources that was ruined by Jayson Blair.