I think Hollywood has seen what fandom can do for a project. You can definitely see that when you go to Comic-con.
I wasn't intending to create a comic strip to begin with. So I think I wasn't aware that when the strip started, there had never been a woman's voice quite like this in the newspaper.
I was an 'Ironman' fan. It was in the '70s. I definitely liked comics and drew a lot of panels on my notebook when I should have been studying - probably why I ended up in the arts.
I really don't have a lot in common with the people who attend the Comic Con. It's like assuming that all people who write prose are the same.
I'd been familiar with comics, and I'd collected 'em when I was a kid, but after I got into junior high school, there wasn't much I was interested in.
It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.
And I've always loved commercials. I like working out how to organically weave a brand's message into the writing process. It's like an improv show, where comics ask the audience to throw out a word and a skit is built around it.
People called me a hoodlum and a thug. But they didn't tell you I was a carpenter, an architect, a stand-up comic - even a bartender. And a barbecue cook. But they didn't tell you that.
I'd begun reading Crumb shortly before that, and other underground stuff, so that was an influence to some degree. Of course the Marvel and DC comics, they had been my main interests in my teenage years.
Back when Jerry Seinfeld was just another comedian hanging around the clubs, I'd imitate him to amuse myself and the other comics. The club owners would say, 'What are you doing that for? Nobody knows him.'
I put my comics that are really valuable into regular mylar because I like to look at them. Once they're in those clam shell boxes, they're impossible to open up.
There's no white comic that sells tickets to black people like me. They're going to get their hair done, get a new outfit, and come out to see a white dude.
The thing about 'Watchmen' that people should know is that when it came out there was absolutely nothing like it. Up until then, comics were about the same thing: a guy in tights fighting another guy in tights and saving the girl - that was it.
When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I'd get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.
Ever since I'm done with Zim everyone thinks that I'm going to go back to comics. I've been flooded with emails asking me if I'm working on the new Johnny over and over again.
There's this idea that it has to be made in London. But we've got everything up here, and if you've got comics who are gifted because of where they're from, you shouldn't drag them away from that natural resource.
Some comics have long routines to get them in the mood - I just prefer to sit down, write out the same jokes in a different order and then have a little prayer that I won't be met by silence.
I'm a stand-up comic. Anything else I do besides that is a plus, but stand-up comedy is what I do, it's what I've been doing and it's what I'm going to keep doing.
I get fans stopping me and telling me what a bad man I am. I got a lot of that at Comic-Con. I'd tell them, 'Sorry, mate.'
Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.
We have to do a film parody for Comic Relief. We can't decide which film to parody at the moment. Any ideas welcome, but not Spiderman owing to costume being too tight.
