When I'm sitting at my drafting table in my studio, I could really be anywhere.
I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.
The type of cartooning that I think is generally referred to as 'alternative' or 'underground' is usually - the distinction is usually in terms of whether it's made by one person, the entire thing is done by one hand or more of a production line process, which is how the comics that we grew up reading were made.
I wanted to be as invisible as possible as an artist. I wanted to differentiate between myself and who I'm writing about.
Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.
There's a part of me that feels like it gets really frustrating to keep working in the manner that I made the book 'Shortcomings,' where everything is pretty accurate to the real world.
On a very basic, concrete level, there have been times when my work, regardless of the content, has harmed relationships because I made that work such a primary priority in my life.
A lot of the qualities in 'Killing and Dying' is sort of a response to work I'd done previously. I wanted to push myself in some different directions.
I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.
I had relatives who would go to Japan and bring back random stuff they bought at the airport or whatever - 'Ultraman' and 'Speed Racer,' stuff like that.
It's a strange thing to be a so-called alternative cartoonist, because in the early part of my career, I was really tethered to the superhero world.
It's absolutely chilling to think that I've been working on a comic-book series called 'Optic Nerve' since I was sixteen.
I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.
When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.
I've always liked the tradition of publishing work serially in the comic-book 'pamphlet' format and then collecting that work in book form, so I've just stuck with it.
There's never been a moment where I sat down at my drawing board and thought, 'I'm a pro!'
Ninety percent of the time when I'm working, there's this very palpable sensation that I'm doing everything wrong and should just give up.
The comics work is very slow, and it basically involves working for sometimes years in isolation and not knowing how the work is going to be received.
I think the response I get to one 'New Yorker' cover outweighs five books that I publish.
I'm sometimes a cartoonist, and there's an audience for that, and I'm sometimes an illustrator, and there's an audience for that.
