It's one thing to have a relationship to lay your hands on it and another to make it continue and last. That's something I haven't talked about much in my comic strips and it's certainly something I'm interested in.

When you're young with less on the line it's easier to be audacious to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics sex drugs rock-and-roll etc. - to the comics page which for many years caused a rolling furor.

Publishing the lyric books poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!

And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane Chandler Jim Thompson and noir movies like Fuller Orson Welles Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I'm a spoilt brat. I thought I was just going to walk in and make movies. But I'd been my own boss for so long that all of a sudden to be facing a roomful of people who were niggling over every little scene... I just thought I'd go back and draw my comics and have a happy life.

You know comics and movies even if you take a comic and turn it into a movie we can't all be Joss Whedon.

On radio and television magazines and the movies you can't tell what you're going to get. When you look at the comic page you can usually depend on something acceptable by the entire family.

I'm not sure anybody's ready to see me in a drama. And loving movies so much I've seen a lot of comics try to make that transition too fast and it can be detrimental. And I don't think I've had as much success as I need in the comedy genre to open up those opportunities.

I think if you do something effectively whether you're the lover or the comic or the action guy or the villain like I play movies are very expensive to make. Chances are you'll get asked to play that part again.

When I was a boy I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.

That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

Imagine my surprise when after a lifetime of teaching me to keep personal things to myself Mom insisted my drawings were the start of a comic strip for millions of people to enjoy.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.

Not being a comic book fan being thrown into that and seeing the extreme - it's taken very seriously. So I tried to do as much learning as I could about it so I wasn't mean or anything.

I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning four years were spent refining and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.

I thought they may have presumed too much knowledge of certain things for people who are not comedians. Like Montreal. A comic understands what it is and its importance but someone else may not know about it.