“I had a very diametrically opposite set of parents.”

Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.

I always thought of Levittown as a joke.

Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

Frivolity is a stern taskmaster.

Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there’s nothing real about it; it’s an adult using a kid’s body as a mouthpiece.

What I do is draw but if you make an animated feature obviously it takes a whole team of people, and Zippy is my work. I felt that turning it over to a team of people would be wrong.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

My first character was Mr. Toad.

Comics is a language. It’s a language most people understand intuitively.

If something is going on in my life, it winds up getting into my strip.

The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.

I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if thats what youd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.

When I was an art student in the early 60′s before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.

I guess if you take yourself seriously as an artist there starts either the problem or the beauty of doing good artwork.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

A full, rich drawing style is a drawback.

Look, there’s no denying that comics have moved dramatically into the mainstream in North American culture in the last 10 years.