A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.
The thing I like most about books is that anybody can afford them. They have an innate valuelessness.
I had a messy signature as a child, and my grandmother said this suggested I had no regard for other people. She was right.
My mother was always encouraging about my wanting to be an artist.
Well, there are better cartoonists now than there ever have been. I firmly believe that. There's some amazing work being done.
One of the things that appealed to me most about comics was that you can pick the ones you like and build your own personal pantheon.
When I was 11 years old, I thought, 'All I really wanna be able to do is my own comic book,' and I'm doing it. I don't have any other real ambitions. I have nothing to conquer at all.
Drawing on a computer doesn't make any sense to me. It's not intuitive.
I still can't get over the idea that respectable adults now go to see superhero movies and that such films get reviewed in the 'New Yorker.' Clearly, I am seriously out of step with the times.
As I've gotten older I've occasionally found myself nostalgic for earlier periods of solitude, though I realize that's also likely a false nostalgia, as I know there was nothing I wanted more during those periods than to not be alone, whatever that means.
My wife has joked that if anything ever happened to me, she'd gladly live out her life without anyone else around. I think it bugs her I'm home all the time; such is the life cycle of the cartoonist, however.
When I was a kid, I liked books that just seemed so dense you could lose yourself in them for a whole afternoon. They were like their own whole world.
There seems to be such a laziness in - and I hate to use this phrase - the modern world. Everything is pumped out so quickly so that you can read it while passing by, like billboards or those flashcards before movie shows.
Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional, and the emotion in the music is built in, whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed.
There seems to be a peculiar kind of clamor for comics. And I'm not sure how much a part of reality that is. I think partly it's based on some idea that comics are what everybody wants to read - and I don't think that's the case.
As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.
