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.

I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an "honest" writer.

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.

[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.

I want to point out to adults that there is a world of good material available to you now in comic form - in this medium - and learn to give it your support because the more you support it, the better the material will be as it comes out.

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.