A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems.

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

Humor has historically been tied to the mores of the day. The Yellow Kid was predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish. When you're different in a society, you're funny.

Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.

[Before the Spirit] I had been producing comic books for 15-year-old cretins from Kansas [I wanted to aim for] a 55-year-old who had his wallet stolen on the subway. You can't talk about heartbreak to a kid.

Comics, which are really best described as an arrangement of images in a sequence that tell a story - an idea - is a very old form of graphic communication. It began with the hieroglyphics in Egypt, it first appeared in a recognizable form in the Medieval times as copper plates produced by the Catholic church to tell morality stories.