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The Bloom County creator discusses his rapid rise from college cartoonist to syndication in over 400 newspapers, boosted by Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury sabbatical which doubled his paper count overnight. He addresses the inevitable Doonesbury comparisons — "after a couple of months, that image is just dispelled" — and traces his real influences to Dr. Seuss and irreverent humor rather than political satire, explaining he deliberately avoids injecting his personal politics into the strip. Shares a cautionary tale from his college strip Academia Waltz about an insensitive cartoon depicting Mexican-American protesters that nearly got him shot. Discusses the origins of characters including the wheelchair-bound Cutter John (chosen to represent an underrepresented minority without exploiting the disability) and how his original dog character had to be scrapped when Garfield debuted with a nearly identical personality. Expresses frustration with the state of newspaper comics — strips being developed primarily to sell merchandise rather than tell stories — and admits he'd ultimately prefer writing screenplays and novels to cartooning.