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'Peanuts' is a life-long influence, going back to before I could even read.

Basically, I learned to read by reading 'Peanuts,' just wanting to know what they were saying.

For me, the very last great strip is 'Peanuts.' After 'Peanuts,' there are a very few strips that I enjoyed for different reasons, but I don't think they were great. I don't think anything's come along since Charles Schulz - and I mean since 1950 - that I think rises above the professional or the eccentric into that realm of greatness.

In general, daily strips were just a regular part of my childhood. So even if I wasn't a huge fan of most of those strips, I still read them religiously every morning while I ate my cereal.

You learn just by trying and experimenting. By the time I was 14, I had my own comic strip in the Kansas City paper.

A comic strip that your parents read when they were young is a curious thing: it's an heirloom, and it's also intimate. You peer through windows and look at the things that made your elders laugh, and then you wonder whether the laugh really belongs to you.

When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.

As a comic, I used to know more about pop culture.

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.

With Charlie Brown, it was about loneliness and isolation. I always thought that the thing about Charlie Brown and those characters was the absence of the parents. Half the strip was about who wasn't there. The parents were never in the picture.