Alison Bechdel

The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.

Well, I'm always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl.

Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project.

I hope that I can get people to read it without having to change it. Especially now that the strip has more different kinds of characters. It's really not all lesbians any more.

I just met someone who read Gone With the Wind 62 times for exactly that same reason. She couldn't bear that it wasn't real. She wanted to live in it.

It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.

For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me.

I just have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I work really hard at promoting myself.