I've never taken any issue off the table for lack of suitability. Only for lack of imagination.
Any time you bring sexuality into the comics pages, you have to brace for pushback.
Medical decisions have been politicized. What doctor wants a state legislator in his consulting room?
I've been getting pulled from newspapers for my entire career.
For the most part, editors no longer view 'Doonesbury' as a rolling provocation, which is fine by me. It makes no sense to intentionally antagonize the very people on whose support you most depend.
I don't want to sound disingenuous here - controversy is obviously good for business, especially if your business is satire. And it does amplify the discussion - in my view, a good thing.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no subject that's off the table.
I'm still passionately interested in what my fellow humans are up to. For me, a day spent monitoring the passing parade is a day well-spent.
I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.
In their heyday, comics were a dominant force in popular culture, but that's over.
Coming up with ideas is really hard - they don't spontaneously pop into my head while I'm cutting vegetables.
There is nothing worse than annotated humour.
I'm never happier than when I'm not working. The strip is a job - that's why I take money for it. It's a job I'm passionate about, but it's a job I totally leave in the studio when I walk out of here, unless I'm late and I have to work at home. I never think of the strip unless I'm compelled to.
I think it's very dangerous for people who do anything that's public to venture on the Web and check out what people are saying about them. Yes, you're bound to find things that will delight you - but you also find things that will make you brood and feel bad about yourself. Why would you intentionally invite that into your life?
Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts - a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff - but we certainly don't think of them adding up over time to some larger portrait of our times.
When you're young, with less on the line, it's easier to be audacious, to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics, sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, etc. - to the comics page, which for many years caused a rolling furor.
Having stretched the boundaries some, I'm perfectly content now to work within them. 'Doonesbury' doesn't need to become 'South Park.' You won't ever see any singing turds.
I can only try to keep the characters interesting; it's up to the readers to decide whether they're still relevant.
I try not to second-guess editors; they're the clients, and I have no expectation that my strip is going to make it into every paper every day.
Comic strips are like a public utility. They're supposed to be there 365 days a year, and you're supposed to be able to hit the mark day after day.
