“Dark” and “sophisticated” are two words that are used to describe your work. Do you think more people are becoming interested in reading books marketed as “serious comics”?
I’ve never really – and this sounds stupid because I’m working in a commercial medium — but I’ve never thought about an audience, or written for a specific audience, per se. I’m just trying to pull together my ideas in the best possible way, and I’ve never tailored those ideas for a particular audience. I bet I could do a pretty good teenage vampire story, for example. It would have plenty of romance, and just the right amount of titillating sex, but I think I’d wind up out on the Ben Franklin Bridge looking down at that water and thinking it looked pretty good down there [laughs]. I’ve really tried to put blinders on and just tell my stories the best way I can.

You wrote Black Hole over the course of about ten years. How does such a prolonged writing process affect a single work or a single storyline?
Comics were always work that I did for myself, primarily. I did commercial work and advertising to pay the bills, but my comics were work that I had to start and stop on over a long period of time because of the logistics of taking on more jobs, dealing with the real world, raising a family and so on. But when I look back, I think there are benefits to having that process of starting and stopping. I think if I’d barreled through with no distractions, it would have been a very different kind of story. Instead, I had a chance to step back from it occasionally, and reflect on how I wanted to proceed.