I entered high school she[ my mother] said, "Well, you're a teenager now, and comics are for kids, so you shouldn't read them anymore," and I went, "Oh, okay," and I gave away what, of course, would now be thousands of dollars worth of comics to the neighborhood kids.

There's a difference between sexy and hyper-sexy. The way I have drawn Vampirella, she's definitely sexy, I designed the costume. But her costume, through the years, has gotten briefer and briefer. She has been hypersexualized, but not by me. I mean, I see drawings in which she's got the 'brokeback pose'. I would never do that.

I always drew. I don't remember a time when I didn't draw. And I actually drew comics from the age of maybe ten through twelve.

Disney has a bible for their characters, so that people who draw Disney characters have to make them look correct.

I went to art school, but I didn't last because in those days you couldn't take comics as a course. And they weren't even teaching you to draw real things, they were really into abstracts, and I was not into abstracts, so art school and I did not work out.

I object to the hypersexualization of all the superheroines. Most of them have been hypersexualized, but especially to Wonder Woman, because she is an icon. She is up there with Superman and Batman. And she is the one who is the big influence on women. Women who don't read comics still know who Wonder Woman is.

Today, although as a whole, the industry is still male-dominated, more women are drawing comics than ever before, and there are more venues for them to see their work in print. In the 1950s, when the comic industry hit an all-time low, there was no place for women to go. Today, because of graphic novels, there's no place for aspiring women cartoonists to go but forward.