Quotes

The room is the most important thing about recording.

I've never been much for theory and scales.

When you're used to seeing someone being coldly efficient on court and suddenly they go on stage and into your world - it's fascinating.

A band is sort of like a star. It reaches a peak and burns out. To have five guys working in perfect harmony longer than a couple years is difficult.

I get to fish a lot of wild and wonderful places on tour.

To me, anyone with an Australian accent wielding a tennis racket is cool.

I had relatives who would go to Japan and bring back random stuff they bought at the airport or whatever - 'Ultraman' and 'Speed Racer,' stuff like that.

When I'm sitting at my drafting table in my studio, I could really be anywhere.

Most normal boys, as they're growing up, they - in order to become attractive, they might, you know, get good at sports or join a rock band or develop good social skills, and for some reason, I thought that drawing comic books might be my route.

I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.

Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.

It's a strange thing to be a so-called alternative cartoonist, because in the early part of my career, I was really tethered to the superhero world.

It's absolutely chilling to think that I've been working on a comic-book series called 'Optic Nerve' since I was sixteen.

I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.

When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.

I've always liked the tradition of publishing work serially in the comic-book 'pamphlet' format and then collecting that work in book form, so I've just stuck with it.

There's never been a moment where I sat down at my drawing board and thought, 'I'm a pro!'

Ninety percent of the time when I'm working, there's this very palpable sensation that I'm doing everything wrong and should just give up.

The comics work is very slow, and it basically involves working for sometimes years in isolation and not knowing how the work is going to be received.

I think the response I get to one 'New Yorker' cover outweighs five books that I publish.

I'm sometimes a cartoonist, and there's an audience for that, and I'm sometimes an illustrator, and there's an audience for that.

The art editor in charge of the covers at the 'New Yorker' is Francoise Mouly. She's very familiar with the eccentricities and personalities of cartoonists, so working with her is very easy.

For a lot of the time I was in Berkeley, I was single. I was living in a kind of collegiate apartment by myself - it was like a protracted summer vacation. So at least in hindsight, I have gloomy emotions attached to Berkeley, whereas I started coming to New York because I was dating someone, and it was very exciting and romantic.

The most impactful comics that I've read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world.

I was just taking my sketchbook to Kinko's and making photocopies and hand-assembling them - folding them over and stapling them.