I Originally Just Wanted To Be An

Avatar Is A Total Nerd Thing, And Yet Our Popular Culture Has Somehow Made All That Stuff Acceptable.

I Knew How To Draw All Of The Different Smokestacks On The Old Trains And All That Stuff, And Then I Realized That If I Can Draw Trains, Which Is The Thing I Was Probably The Least Interested In In The World At The Time, I Can Do Anything And Find A Way Into It That Will Be Interesting.

There Are Certain Things In There That No One Else Would Recognize, Really. I See Details Of My Life That I Didn't Even Intend To Put In When I Was Doing The Work. For Example, I Noticed That Every Single Kid In The High School In The Death-ray Is Based On Somebody I Went To High School With.

Usually When I Put Together A Book Like This Death-ray Hardcover Or That Ghost World Special Edition, Then I Have To Reread It And See If There Is Anything I Want To Change Or Any Re-coloring I Want To Do. That's When I'm Faced With The Actual Work. When I'm Working, I'm Too Close To It. I'm Sort Of Inside, And I Can't See It At All. So When I Have That Experience Of Rereading It Years Later, It's Jarring.

It's A Challenge To Express Real Life In Dramatic Terms. In An Entirely "made-up" Story, You Are Sometimes Overwhelmed By The Infinite Possibilities.