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I was doing illustration work, and the cartooning slowly took over.

Making cartoons means very hard work at every step of the way, but creating a successful cartoon character is the hardest work of all.

When the show's in production, we work for three weeks at a time and then take a week off.

You know, comics were created at the same time as the cinema. And the cinema very quickly became a major art. Cartooning didn't become a major art. There's a reason for that. People don't know how to deal with drawings.

Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.

For most of my career I did one comic a day, every day, including weekends and holidays.

The wonderful thing about the cartoon form is it's a combination of words and pictures. You don't have to choose, and the contribution of the two often winds up being greater than the sum of its parts.

Cartooning is about deconstruction: you gotta tear something down to make a joke.

At that time, the people that were in the animated film business were mostly guys who were unsuccessful newspaper cartoonists. In other words, their ability to draw living things was practically nil.