If a good cartoonist can make a living making his comics, he'll continue to do that; the lesser insincere cartoonist that gets a lot of press will fall by the wayside eventually.
I used to get people criticizing me for drawing so many women with gorgeous idealized bodies, but I pointed out that I draw a lot of men with muscular bodies, washboard abs, and enormous wangs, and they never got criticized. So those criticisms have stopped.
It wasn't until I started to do 'Poison River' that the readership started falling. 'Poison River' started out very slowly and simply, but then it got really dense and complicated. I don't know, I think the readers just got fed up or burned out. They started dropping off.
I had always shown childhood as something difficult, something you want to get the hell out of, but now I wanted to do a story that was the opposite, about that moment in time when you're in that world of discovery, doing what you want to do. That fleeting moment when you're in your zone.
I grew up when comics were only sold in food markets and news stands, so the direct market is vital to me. The best way to make it stronger is if everybody buys my comics in multiple copies before they buy any others.
I get to draw what I like to draw, basically people hangin' around, and write very humanistic kinds of situations and characters. But I do also like to draw adventure stories - more in terms of drawing them than writing them - and letting my imagination go wild.
I've known gay people - men and women - since I was a young person. To me it's just naturalistic and realistic to portray gay characters in a humanistic light. As a young man, I knew enough gay people as people not to fear them. On the other side of the coin, I like to irritate conservatives and homophobes.
I'm working so much I don't see the work of many young cartoonists so it's hard for me to tell which are my favourites. Maybe when I get to stick my head out of the sand I'll be able to let you know.
I wanted to do pretty much a purely boy story, yes. The girls are kind of the bad guys in 'Marble Season', although that wasn't my intention. It's also a world without adults.
I think I related more literally to the early 'Spider-Man' comics from Steve Ditko because it could be upfront and direct about the problems of being a kid. He captured being a teenager so beautifully.
I felt like challenging myself and challenging my readers with something darker and heavier. I don't know how to explain it, because I'm not a political person. I have two political stories, and that's it: 'Human Diastrophism' and 'Poison River'.
For me, the reason to make the movie is that if people like the comic, then people would like the movie if it was well made. There are good movies for them, but very few. And I mean that in a true sense. If they love your story for freaking 30 years, then they can do a movie about it.
When you're young you don't know anything, but you have lot of energy to express yourself. So you make a lot of mistakes and you stumble, but you also get a lot of truth from within.
I've dealt with Hollywood about having my work made into a film or cartoon but nothing came of it. That's not to say I wouldn't like to see something happen.
Anyone could identify with the human aspect of the characters.
I'm basically stubborn. If anyone disapproved of my being influenced by comics, I simply ignored them.
Sex is the main way we exist on the planet. It's an essential part of life.
I've always been interested in the way males seem to need to start clubs, or cults, to keep girls out until they need them for sex. It comes from some weird immature tribal crap, I'm sure.
Once we got going on the Fantagraphics version of Love and Rockets, our encouragement was constant. People wanted us to do more, do more. Thirty years later, here we are.
I notice a lot of younger artists have difficulty telling stories. They might have short stories where they express themselves well, but they don't really know how to tell stories with characters. That craft just passed them by.
I like doing whatever interests me. It's a challenge for me to try to make good comics out of any genre I tackle. I trust my instincts in getting me through the more difficult genres for modern readers, like violent crime or horror stories.
I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. I always wanted to pursue either music or comics, so when the opportunity came from comics publisher Fantagraphics for my brothers Jaime and Mario and I to make a comic book together, we jumped at the chance: "Let's just do it and see what happens." Really, we weren't sure where we were going to go with it. We thought our work was good enough to be out there, but we didn't know that the response was going to be pretty good, pretty quick.
If you believe in what you're doing, and someone criticizes that, it's likely that they're just coming from a different place and they're bringing their own baggage and it's basically projection. I try not to let it get to me.
It takes time to learn to draw. It takes years, not a few weeks.
I've seen that most people change as they get older.
