Ted Naifeh

When I first starting conceiving series like 'Courtney,' 'Polly,' 'How Loathsome,' etc., I was shooting for closed story-arcs but open-ended concepts. Then I started realizing I was committing myself to potentially endless series.

I love gothic monsters, but I like to root them more firmly in the traditional folklore from which they sprang. Or at least, I like to evoke the feeling of those folk stories.

Artists forget than the first purpose of a comic character is to convey emotion. Everything else, like realism, or other kinds of virtuosity, is an optional extra. If you sacrifice expression for the sake of other concerns, you're putting the cart before the horse.

The living werewolves have genuine needs and desires, which, though they may oppose ours, are valid. Even if they want to eat humans, you can't really call them evil, any more than mice can call cats evil, or chickens can call humans evil. It's all just a matter of where you're standing.

Some of the best art in the world is collaborative, a mix of voices that are stronger together than separate. Take the Beatles, for example. Or every great movie ever made. We like to say they're the director's vision, but really, they're huge collaborations between directors, writers, actors, even producers.

When people think girl adventurers, they tend to think of a spunky, plucky tom-boy with a chip on her shoulder. I'm not saying that this makes for a dull character, but I think other types of adventurous girls exist. It's easy to fall into well-established tropes, believing that the tropes of a genre define the genre itself.

The first 'Polly and the Pirates' is about a prim and proper girl who gets kidnapped out of her comfy boarding school by a bunch of pirates that think she's the daughter of their long lost queen. In the course of the adventure, she discovers she has a natural penchant for swashbuckling, despite her sheltered childhood.

There's something about girls and unicorns that's deep and meaningful. Something about childhood.

I think about 'The Simpsons,' which has been going on for 25 years. Homer is still in his late 30's. Lisa is 8, Bart is 10. Their stories are told. Yet the series keeps going on and on like a zombie that won't lie down and die. That feels forced and unnatural. The characters never change, grow, age.

I hear all the time that boys don't like stories about girls. Which never made much sense to me. Wasn't 'Terminator' about a girl? And 'Alien'? Hell, I grew up on 'The Wizard of Oz.' People enjoy stories about anything if they're good stories.

I like characters with character, not just pretty faces. Anyway, I think people can be both grotesque and beautiful at the same time. Look at Mick Jagger in the seventies. Look at Angelina Jolie.

I think there's too much saturated color in comics, thanks to digital color techniques.