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When people say 'What are underground comics?' I think the best way you can define them is just the absolute freedom involved... we didn't have anyone standing over us.

Cartoonist was the weirdest name I finally let myself have. I would never say it. When I heard it I silently thought, what an awful word.

Of course, I started really being a comics fan with the underground stuff in the '70s.

I'm a comic nerd. I'm a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.

I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics.

I wanted to build up a name for myself.

I didn't want to be known as a gay comic, but as a comic who happens to be gay.

I wanted to make a name for myself.

My name is Michael Pennington, and I am not a comic character.