You have to acquire a personal peace of mind which comes with understanding.
The sizes and shapes of the panels have never been important to my stories. It has always been the words and images that drew me in, kind of like watching a movie.
Every time I copy something, I can draw it for the rest of my life. But research is so painful - I mean just opening up a magazine looking for a picture of a car or looking out the window looking for a car is just hard!
It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.
I used to always read my stuff. And I could never understand why artists would say, 'Oh, I can't read my older stuff. ' I'd go, 'Are you crazy? I could read my stuff forever!' Now it's a little harder.
Half of me is very excited and the other half is 'Haven't we seen this stuff before?' But I'm very impressed. I almost couldn't picture it when it was being put together. I couldn't picture it being in my hand, what it would look like.
Comics as art. I do comics as comics, and my opportunity to tell stories. Simple. Basic. Let the characters have the excitement, not the package. That's where I come from.
Maybe life was like a sea, and all the people were like boats. . . Everybody who was born was cast into the sea. Winds would blow them in all directions. Tides would rise and turn, in their own rhythm. And the boats - they just went along as best they could, trying to find a harbor.
I think that the good thing about working smaller and being a smaller company that doesn't have to make as much to make money back is that you don't have to worry about, well, critics like this and they'll tell people to buy it, but millions of people might say, 'Oh, well I'm not interested in that subject matter' and we're sunk.
Where you need to make fast decisions, people have to work in an open space where I can just walk to somebody's cube, so we don't need to schedule meetings for absolutely everything.
We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.