GILBERT HERNANDEZ

Reviewers and critics can be overly cynical. If something the least bit sentimental comes up, they'll often start flying off the handle. But I'm like, 'Wait a minute, you've had those times in your life. Everybody has.'

It wasn't until school that we realised that we were abnormal.

Our father died when we were very young, so our mother raised six kids. We saw the world filtered through her eyes, being a minority woman raising six kids.

I happen to think Latinas, Latin women, are the most beautiful women in the world. So that's what I'm going to draw. I love women from all cultures, of course, but if I was going to deal with any of them, that would be No. 1 for me.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

We grew out of the superhero comics, but we still liked comics, so we started putting our own experiences in the stories we were doing for our own amusement.

I wanted to do pretty much a purely boy story, yes. The girls are kind of the bad guys in 'Marble Season', although that wasn't my intention. It's also a world without adults.

I grew up being really insecure and dumped on, over-feeling certain things in a negative way. So I thought I had something to prove.

In the old days, I just could not leave characters alone. Now I just try to keep the ones that still have something in the way of stories to tell.

I had always shown childhood as something difficult, something you want to get the hell out of, but now I wanted to do a story that was the opposite, about that moment in time when you're in that world of discovery, doing what you want to do. That fleeting moment when you're in your zone.

I know what a good movie is.

I've dealt with Hollywood about having my work made into a film or cartoon but nothing came of it. That's not to say I wouldn't like to see something happen.

My two biggest influences are Archie comics and Dennis the Menace.

I felt like challenging myself and challenging my readers with something darker and heavier. I don't know how to explain it, because I'm not a political person. I have two political stories, and that's it: 'Human Diastrophism' and 'Poison River.'

We thought everybody read comics. We didn't know we were weird. We didn't know people that collected comics were strange. It was as normal as listening to rock music on the radio.

I think I related more literally to the early 'Spider-Man' comics from Steve Ditko because it could be upfront and direct about the problems of being a kid. He captured being a teenager so beautifully.

I've sort of dealt with the characters' lives more; particularly the women characters.

We were very happy when a South African court, which had previously ruled against us, took another look and decided that this material was not obscene and allowed it into the country.

Dennis the Menace was probably the most realistic comic book ever done. No space aliens ever invaded!

When you're young you don't know anything, but you have lot of energy to express yourself. So you make a lot of mistakes and you stumble, but you also get a lot of truth from within.

I grew up when comics were only sold in food markets and news stands, so the direct market is vital to me. The best way to make it stronger is if everybody buys my comics in multiple copies before they buy any others.

It wasn't until I started to do 'Poison River' that the readership started falling. 'Poison River' started out very slowly and simply, but then it got really dense and complicated. I don't know, I think the readers just got fed up or burned out. They started dropping off.

I always felt I was living in two worlds. One was the Mexican world, because nearly everybody I knew, relatives and cousins and kids in the neighbourhood, were Mexican. Then school was a different world. It was ethnically mixed.

For me, the reason to make the movie is that if people like the comic, then people would like the movie if it was well made. There are good movies for them, but very few. And I mean that in a true sense. If they love your story for freaking 30 years, then they can do a movie about it.

I've known gay people - men and women - since I was a young person. To me it's just naturalistic and realistic to portray gay characters in a humanistic light. As a young man, I knew enough gay people as people not to fear them. On the other side of the coin, I like to irritate conservatives and homophobes.