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If you want to draw comics, you really have to love to draw, as you will be spending many hours sitting down with a pencil or pen in your hand.

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.

One of the things when you're drawing a comic book is that you're spending four or five times as long to draw it as the writer takes to write it. In my career I've had to spend a week drawing something that a writer has thrown out in an hour. And there's nothing worse than having to work on something that no previous thought has gone into.

That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

I'm a big illustration and comic book fan. In my eyes, comic books and illustration are the same kind of art forms.

I never really read comics. I bought them, and I would draw them.

I draw on a lot of cinematic influences like Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders, artists who let a story take its time. Comics are a visual medium, and visuals should be allowed to tell some of that story.

I always start drawing any job by planning out to some degree the locales and trying to nail the characters. If they're existing characters, I'll draw them several times on rough paper just to get a feeling for them. The ideal when you're drawing a comic is to have everything in your head, not to have to refer to notes.

With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.