Cartoonist

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.

I started to get bored with that stuff about only drawing men and I've taken it out of the slideshow.

Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls' clothing, I couldn't wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy's frocks.

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.

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.

I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.

I probably read Harriet the Spy about 70,000 times.

Autobiographical comics, I love them. I love them.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.

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.

Even drawing gray hair at all is difficult to render in black and white.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.

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.

I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.

Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.

The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.

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.