I'm More Interested In Characters Who Are

Avatar Is A Total Nerd Thing, And Yet Our Popular Culture Has Somehow Made All That Stuff Acceptable.

I Have This Certain Vision Of The Way I Want My Comics To Look; This Sort Of Photographic Realism, But With A Certain Abstraction That Comics Can Give. It's Kind Of A Fine Line.

Everybody Just Lets The Media Do Their Thinking For Them... That's Why You'll Never Hear Any Reggae On The Radio!

I Used To Use Cigarettes To Indicate Somebody's An Outsider A Lot. It Gave Character A Seedy, Disreputable, Almost Suicidal Quality. Now Cigarettes Are So Unused - - You Can't Have Anybody Indoors Smoking. If You Drew That In A Restaurant, You'd Have To Have A Panel Where The Manager Comes Over And Kicks Them Out. Unless It's Set In Europe, You Can't Really Do That. Characters Who Smoke - - It Dates Comics, Somehow.

I'd Always Wanted To Do A Weekly Strip, Or A Strip That Was In Installments Like That. It's Been Fun Trying To Figure Out How To Make That Work. Their Standards Are So Prissy That They Won't Allow Me To Use All Kinds Of Language. Not Only Can You Not Swear, This Morning I Was Informed I Couldn't Use The Word "schmuck." I Couldn't Use "crap," "schmuck," Or "get Laid." Those Three Were Beyond The Pale. But You Get Around That, And It Comes Out Better. I Can't Quite Explain Why.