My work is so unorthodox that from one panel to the next, the drawings are completely different... totally opposed to the way of working in something like animation, where every drawing has to look like the one before.

The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.

I think that true horror is accomplished by slowly getting into your brain. The old way is much more scary.

I have 40 years of unpublished material, the ones they don't pick, and the reason I don't redraw them or use them again is that I like to use my brain every day and come up with new jokes.

I'd love to do a whole series of stories and have them collected into books.

When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.

I keep very weird hours. I never know when I'm going to get an idea.

Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.

I have always loved horror very much. I used to write stories for DC's House of Mystery. It was one of my first jobs writing for comics, and I loved it.

Generally what I produce is new. Of course, they are often variations on the same subject.

If the gag is complicated, you spend more time thinking about the way you're drawing it.

With Groo, I try to do one story every book. Sometimes the stories are better if they go a little longer, and I choose to do it in four issues.

The sad events that occur in my life are the sad events that happen to everybody, with losing friends and family, but that is a natural occurrence, as natural as being born.

Sometimes, you start with the drawing and then the gag comes to you in the middle of it. That is when you start working on the solution of the gag, which is composition, placing, equilibrium, and character design.

My best sources are my travels and my collection of National Geographic.

The Western, when I do one, will be one long, continuous story.

Once you've established where you are, you go to the character and elaborate on expressions and action.

When sadness happens in the middle of work, I separate my personal grief from my train of thought.

At the end of the '60s, I was trying to enter the world of comics.

Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns.

The Boogeyman is your conscience. The Boogeyman is the result of your own bad behavior. I love this Boogeyman.

Comics is a great medium to get a lot of stories out.

For every issue, I send four pages of finished marginals and they select the ones they need.

Anyone can write a story based on the kind of horror where you see a guy in car and then there's the bad guy in the back seat. It's infantile to rely on that for telling a story. That's like going to bed and thinking there's a monster under your bed. It's silly.

I live in a very small town and now that I've closed down my studio, I'm working at home.

I don't enjoy the boo scare when you're watching a movie and then suddenly there's a big shark on the screen. The only thing they're doing is catching you off guard.

My work is so unorthodox that from one panel to the next, the drawings are completely different... totally opposed to the way of working in something like animation, where every drawing has to look like the one before.

Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.

One of the best animated films I've seen come out of Disney was the Tarzan movie. I wasn't crazy about the story or the design on Tarzan's face, but the traditional animation was spectacular.

Animation is tremendously resilient. Animation will recover, as art always recovers. There's always cycles of good art.

When The Simpsons came around, there really was nothing else like it on TV. It's hard to imagine, but when Fox first took the plunge with it, it was considered controversial to put animation on prime time.

But probably for the last ten years or so, I've been fitting in animation work into my other projects.

So many plays with magic in them that would be a terrific invitation to an imaginative animation team.

Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue.

I know pretty well in the broad sense what I'm going to do, because I have to know that when we shoot the live-action, so that it'll synchronize. Then I know pretty well when I get to the animation stage, what that scene requires.

The success of The Simpsons really opened doors. It showed that if you were working in animation you didn't necessarily have to be working in kids' television.

I love doing the voice of Batman because of the quality of the animation. The music is particularly incredible. Another bonus is getting the opportunity to work with some very respected actors who do not usually do voice work.

We go through, I think, six different drafts of each script. And then my shooting it is roughly, you know, fifteen percent of the total work that gets done on a show. Then it's all post-production animation after that.

Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!

I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.

The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.

In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing.

Yes, actually. Animation's a very easy thing to watch on tour.

If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer animated films for your children in the back seat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story.

In the animation world, people who understand pencils and paper usually aren't computer people, and the computer people usually aren't the artistic people, so they always stand on opposite sides of the line.

Well, for one thing, the executives in charge at Cartoon Network are cartoon fans. I mean, these are people who grew up loving animation and loving cartoons, and the only difference between them and me is they don't know how to draw.

You don't have a face to work with, so your voice has to do all the work until you see the animation. So, a lot of it I had to pull back because it was too big.

We always thought the Tom Tom Club could change to anything, but it acquired this image, which was cartoon animation and this real light-hearted dance music.