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.

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.

I had tried to come up with a superhero comic, but it didn't work 'cause I wasn't a superhero artist, and I left it unfinished.

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.

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.

I saw the comics in the East Village Other, and they weren't superhero comics, they were all about hippies and all about things hippies were interested in. And there was one page in particular, a full page strip called "Gentle's Trip Out" signed "Panzika", and it was totally, totally psychedelic, and really, I don't know if it made any sense at all but it looked so great, and I thought, "This is what I want to do, this is my big influence," and it was.

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.