My ideas come from everywhere. I never know what is going to spark a story. Sometimes it's an old monster movie, sometimes it's a song, a cartoon, something a kid says, a photograph, or something I see as I walk down the street. Usually it ends up being all these things sort of mixed together.

George Shrinks, for example, has stuff from the movies King Kong, Babes in Toyland, and books like The Borrowers. A Day With Wilbur Robinson is sort of The Day The Earth Stood Still meets Leave it to Beaver, together with the book The Great Gatsby and things that happened to me when I was a kid.

What is a normal day like for you?

My baby daughter toddles in and wakes me up. I have breakfast and read the paper and think for a while in the bathtub. When I become so wrinkled that I look about a thousand years old, I get out of the tub and get dressed. Then I'll write or draw until lunch time. Then I'll either go out to munch or keep working.

I listen to music while I work. If I'm working on a chase scene, I play really exciting music like "Ride of the Valkyries" or the Batman soundtrack. By 4:00 P.M. I'm completely out of my mind from being stuck inside so I go run amok all over town. Sometimes I get sane again and come back to work for another hour or so. Then I either force my wife to not cook dinner so we can go out to eat or we stay home and all run amok together. When we're all completely exhausted from running amok together, we fall asleep in front of the TV set and have very funny dreams.

Where do you work?

In my private fortress studio stronghold that has a secret password and is guarded by an attack cat named Doris Day, who lost her tail in an automobile accident.

Do you have any children? Any pets?

We have a little girl named Mary Katherine. We also call her "The Wonder Baby." We have a cat. We used to have some goldfish, but they ran away. We have a lot of lizards that live in our yard. A bunch of raccoons live (uninvited) in our attic and play rugby at two o'clock in the morning several times a week.

What do you enjoy drawing the most?

I like drawing robots, spaceships, monsters, and bugs the best.