““What you do for a living?” It used to be easier just to tell people that I was a magazine illustrator than try to explain that I did comics.”

And now people even of our parents’ generation are familiar with the term “graphic novel,” which is kind of amazing.

The loner – it can have a real impact on the art when they realize, I have friends, I’m married, or I have kids. That’s certainly happened to me.

But my impression is that the main impediment to progress in that regard is the number of people who are choosing to make a go of it.

I started publishing my comic while I was still living with my parents.

Who was trying to be cool by writing about young people and a certain kind of Bay Area culture that I was tangentially a part of.

You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.

There were points at which I was trying to use my art to reflect positively on myself, to almost be flirtatious through the work.

That partially due to the world of media and commerce, the idea of a comic book has been lost in the ghetto.

But not the kind of comics that they were used to, and no, it’s not pornography, etc.

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

I never go home and take out those business cards and go to those websites.

But if there was a mini-comic here in my hand, I’d read it while I ate my lunch.

I wanted to avoid doing what I thought people wanted me to do.

The idea of trying to make the effort to produce something, to put something out into the world, rather than just taking in all the stuff the world’s putting out at you.

I do think it’s getting more and more rare in this country to raise a kid with the attitude that creativity is something valuable.

And I do think it’s sort of too bad that what once was a safe haven for truly eccentric, outsider artists is no longer that thing.

Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.

I wasn’t ever a huge fan of comics. Just not one of those kids, you know?

I’m not the guy with the enormous comedy nose or the big feet or the bad posture or the whatever; a physical comic has certain things.

I wasn’t a comic book geek as a kid. I read some, but it was just like, ‘Oh, I have this comic book here.’ It wasn’t like I was collecting them.

When I was a child I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I have ever dreamed has come true a thousand times.

Reading the Martin Luther King story, that little comic book, set me on the path that I’m on today.

I love comic books. I just do.

I love comic books. I just do.