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At any comic book convention in America, you'll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.

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.

As an editorial cartoonist now, I live for those moments of inspiration, and it is exhilarating to be inspired by a topic, have an opinion on the topic, come up with a good cartoon on the topic, and to draw it and get it in the paper the next day. That is what I live for.

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.

People have these ideas about comic books and their adaptations as flashy and sort of surface-y, broad-strokes-type projects, but they're not, really.

I used to think of the cartoons as a magazine within a magazine. First you go through and read all the cartoons, and then you go back and read the articles.

So many cartoonists draw the same year after year. When they find a style, they stick with it. They don't mess with innovation, and they become boring.

I've been writing for a long time, and I've loved comic books for a long time - forever - but I had to learn how to write in a different way to write sequential art for a graphic novel. It's been an interesting transition.

To be honest, writing comics is a dream come true - the form is unparalleled and is home to some of the most original and innovative storytelling around.

I see the cartoonist as contributing to the content, being critical, because we do poke holes in some of the dialogue and find new ways of seeing things.