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I have a great affection for comics, and I think that people underrate comics as a genre.

I've never really been a genre fan. I never grew up reading comic books or was a horror buff.

When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.

In their heyday, comics were a dominant force in popular culture, but that's over.

I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.

In the sixties and seventies you could probably name all the great comics. It was still special.

The audience for comics has shifted dramatically. And the boundaries between books and fine arts have blurred. Maybe it's the globalization of fine art through the Internet - it's easy for certain groups to coalesce around a certain kind of work or medium.

No, I'm not a comic book guy. I'm pretty fascinated with the subculture though and I do think that the world of comic books is such a natural transition into film.

My interests were in fantasy more than comics growing up.

Comics, in a sense, the style, the images - it's almost like music. They say music is a universal language, but when the eyes behold something, a figure, somebody moving; it's real, and it cannot be denied.