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In academia in general, there's this push toward using comics as an educational tool.

I'm still awaiting the idea of drawing comics for a living being a reality. I feel like I've been dodging work for 20 years, and at some point, I'll have to get a real job.

Comics are a particularly esoteric field where you really learn how to do it, by doing it or by learning from other practitioners.

It wasn't until I discovered comics that I actually began to approach drawing as a possible career.

Once I started down the path of co-founding Image Comics, and even co-publisher, it just seems a lot more like a career path that isn't that atypical for someone with a college degree. Whereas, someone who draws comic books as a freelancer and lives from job to job is a more unusual story.

I think if you want to do a thing properly you have to take a lot of care. I've always found it's easier to draw comics if you know clearly in your head what you're drawing, rather than if you try and make it up as you go along.

I ended up reading comics and just started drawing at a very young age. By high school, I was putting together longer stories. In college, I started doing strips for the newspaper and doing mini-comics. It sort of grew in scope and scale over time.

I was always most interested in drawing - most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside.

Learning to write comics is, in fact, so bloody difficult because it's such a weird form that it does actually make you a bit more adaptable for other forms.

When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.