I never planned on being an artist. I was never the kid that everyone was looking over the shoulder of to see what he was drawing. I'm not naturally gifted (unless you count daydreaming as a gift, which it may be, but it may be a curse as well). The thing was, I had a story or a picture in my head and I wanted to see it and no one else was showing it to me. So I kept trying to see it, and it was hard and I was bad at it. And if the aspiration was to be artist I would have given up. And certainly I was uncomfortable when people started saying that what I was doing is art because there were other kids who were drawing images that looked like they were much better than what I was doing. But they weren't drawing what I was trying to see. So I kept working on it and working on it and trying to see the image in my head. And today, I'm still working on it and working on it to see the image.
I write as well. It's just something I do because I can't help it. Everyone wants to be a writer and because of that there is this saturated competition, which results in a lot of critics. I guess we think that we look smart by what we judge. I don't know, to me, I just have ideas and writing is just a way to communicate them. But it seems like a pretty scary landscape to put one's self out with all these writers out there watching who are so involved with the art of words. It kind of makes ideas kind of hard to put out there, with the form of communication being under such scrutiny. I think the trick is to fool people into thinking that what you're doing isn't writing. Maybe that's why I love comics.
Don't refer to comics as graphic novels, to me, unless it is a novel in comic form, which very few collections of comics are. That's a marketing term. It in general attempts to satisfy a high brow sensibility that looks down on comics and there's something apologetic about that. Comics don't need to ask for validation.
I'll also say that I'm a liberal, although I mean that more in the classical sense than by the modern political definition. Generally speaking, I think it's a better idea to have one's own ideas than to subscribe to the ideas of any group, especially when it comes to politics. I believe in reason and in order to understand relevance, you must expose yourself to a differing opinions. That said, you can't get lost in the bullshit of shallow arguments. So there are values that define my views; benevolence, compassion, open mindedness, interconnectedness. I'm not a big fan of damning or stoning anyone, especially for reasons personal to that person, but I don't think intolerance is something that people should feel obligated to tolerate.
