There's something exciting about weekly strips in that you're following the way the story reveals itself to the writer week by week. All the possible directions it could have taken are there; it's a kind of participatory reading that I think books discourage.
Ben Katchor
I never wore a watch. I always depend on public clocks, and stores have clocks, but that is strange.
As a small kid, I came across things like these early Edward Gorey books in department-store bookstores. These were these really unusual objects to me. I didn't know how they fit into the comic world or into newspaper comics.
I remember as a child going to an exhibit about the Soviet Union, and every paper had this alien smell. The paper and the ink were all exported. It was like a piece of cheese from that country, you could touch it, feel it, smell it, and it was different.
In America, there's a very long tradition of a comic strip that comes in newspapers, which is not true all over the world. To sell papers, they put color comics in.
I always lived in old buildings, and I thought about who lived here before. You'd have to be oblivious not to.
A picture story just doesn't run like a film. It doesn't have 24 frames per second. It doesn't deal with this illusion of movement.
I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn't been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place.
I'm very interested in music and where these sounds of Western music come from.
You can have your own watch and always doubt it. If I had a watch I'd probably always be doubting it or the batteries would be dying. I just know that people always have trouble with their watches, and that's why I like public clocks.
Sometimes I make things that people have very strong responses to. Whether that's art, I don't know. That's one of those words that doesn't mean anything. It's why I don't just use words.
The publishing industry has always wanted to make books as cheaply and as ephemerally as they could; it's nothing new.
