Do you have any desire to direct yourself? ^ You know, I kind of do. Not quite yet. I don’t really have an idea in mind that would be something that I’d really like to go out and direct. But it absolutely would be something I’d like to do before I die.
What about Pussey? ^ (Laughs)
What about the Pussey movie? ^ Yeah. It might work as a half-hour TV show. The world is actually getting to the point where it could understand Pussey, which is kind of scary.
I have to say I love Pussey. The comic. The only person I think might be able to pull it off in a movie version is maybe Jack Black. ^ Yeah, he could do it. Or Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Yeah, Philip Seymour Hoffman would be a good Pussey. Subversion on a mass scale, I’m always in support of. Have you thought about taking some of your characters into the world of animation? It’s almost as if the chances for real drama are better in animation when you look at stuff like “King of the Hill.” “The Simpsons” make constant drug references, they make fun of religion, politics, guns, violence. But it’s a cartoon, so it’s okay. “The Simpsons” get away with a lot simply because it’s animated, yet if those issues were dealt with in a dramatic show or a comedy, you could never get away with saying some of those things. ^ I haven’t really thought seriously about it. It would have to be something that I came up with independently of my comics. I don’t like the idea of my comics being translated into cartoons. The idea of other people drawing my images even if they followed my drawings really closely. It would bother me somehow. But if I developed something as a cartoon, I think I’d be more comfortable with that. I totally agree with what you say about the audience. They’ll accept almost anything in cartoon form. There’s stuff on “The Simpsons” that’s so far beyond any live action show it’s always amazing to see the stuff they get away with.
I got this pamphlet that you had done a few years ago that was called, um… ^ Was it the “Modern Cartoonist”?
Yeah, it was so complex and convoluted, it just made my brain hurt. ^ (Laughs)
I think about stuff like that, but this went too far for me. ^ I kind of wanted to do a crazy pamphlet that would be handed out by the Catholic Guild in like 1958. The kind of thing that somebody would find in 20 years and have no idea what it was about. That was my only goal.
It was like a Jack Chick comic to the extreme. That was the one comic of yours that I just had to put down. ^ Thank you.
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