I don't really get hate mail, which surprises me, but people have better things to do than to write hate mail to somebody who writes a book about hating everything, I guess.
Because of the audience I get and the fact that these people aren't traditional comics buyers I don't think the comic industry looks at that and thinks that is a very respectable thing. I'm very used to it. I'm not the guy who wins awards and gets mentioned in magazines.
At this very moment I'm behind on a compilation that Slave Labor is doing for Free Comic Book 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.
I'm definitely incredibly attracted to the aesthetic of what is typically deemed goth stuff, but. A lot of my experience growing up was in being around that kind of thing, and it's just what sinks into a person's brain.
Goth culture, as mired in the past as it is, even it goes through changes, so Goth when I was growing up is not what it is now. When I think of Goth culture as it is at the moment I think of mall culture.
After doing Johnny I wanted to just do something, I wouldn't say innocent, but to not have any care in the world. Lots of setups and horrible happenings but its funny.
But now I have a lot of little kids who watched Invader Zim whenever they could find it on television.
But I couldn't draw as fast as she requested. Thus, I tried to create the worst abomination of a comic that I could, so as to make her not want comics anymore. That abomination, my friends, was Happy Noodle Boy.
As I got farther and farther along in the series I did less and less preparation. I didn't use outlines or sketches. I just had a vague idea of what I wanted to tell and then the dialogue just came to me as I was inking the page.
In pre-school, I was drawing dinosaurs - I was huge into dinosaurs. I wanted to be a paleontologist, not a cartoonist or a filmmaker or anything like that - just a paleontologist. So I would draw dinosaurs.
Retro looking stuff but a lot of these guys doing these shows are my age or younger. I was just disgusted. I hated being around that kind of thing. Not that it affected what I did because when it comes down to it I was doing my own show.
It's very strange to go from being completely secluded and doing your own work for yourself, to having an audience - and having an audience that's aware of what you do and expects you to do things that they like. It can make things difficult.
