I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.
Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.
Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.
Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.
Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.
That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.
I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.
The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.
I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.
Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.
It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.
I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.
My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.
I love Jules Feiffer. I didn't discover him until I was a little older.
And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.
But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.
I get a lot of mail from men who really identify with Stuart, you know, Sparrow's boyfriend. I love that. Even though I used to say I wanted men to read the strip even though there weren't any men in it, so they'd be forced to identify with the women.
Mostly it was Mad magazine. And I did read a lot of - I had a subscription when I was little, but I also had access to some old collections, the little paperbacks of the really good stuff.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.
