The biggest named childhood influences on my art were Holling C. Holling, who did The Book of Indians, The Book of Cowboys, and the inimitable Pagoo, and Paul Brown's line drawings that illustrated countless books in the late '40s and '50s. I had never read any comics until I started making them, and by then my tastes and style were developed along very different lines.

For years, I drew and wrote and studied strictly for my own pleasure. My inspirations were medieval European illuminated manuscripts and Japanese Floating-World wood block prints, Egyptian and Mayan tomb-paintings, cave art and sand paintings and exhibition quilts -- in fact, anything that told a story with the support of images. My work came to resemble a medieval manuscript, with thousands of words and intricate images crowded onto every one of hundreds of pages. None of it was ever meant to see publication. In 1984 I published a homemade mini-comic, the original Stinz story. The book attracted the attention of Eclipse Comics, that brought out my first work in a book called The Dreamery. Eclipse later published a collection of the stories, Horsebrush and Other Tales. Stinz was then taken up by Fantagraphics, that published four single issues and Brave New Worlds, that published two collections and MU Press that published four more periodical episodes. (It has been said that I've had more publishers than some publishers have artists.)

In 1986 Thoughts and Images brought out The Desert Peach and published the first three issues. The book was taken up by MU Press, later Aeon Press, that continues publishing it today. It has been very favorably reviewed not only by a wide range of strictly comic book journals, but by The Washington Post Book Review.

I think gays like the book because they understand the damage that can be caused by stereotypes. The Peach is a positive gay character, and there aren't a lot of those available in this society. Even his obnoxious lover is seen as a positive bisexual character, and it's even harder to find those if you're bisexual -- especially in the homosexual community, where they're despised, or viewed as "traitors." Don't get me started on gender classifications. And, gays do have a tendency to have a higher level of education.

American Prisoners of War of WWII aren't a group I'm worried about. They were there. Suffering doesn't necessarily make you stupid. If they're going to get angry at me, it will be from a realistic basis, and they'll ask good solid questions. I've never been afraid of good questions. The only people I'd have trouble with are the post-war generations who are falling for the simple-minded media image of war. And over time, I am becoming very impatient with them. You know the warning: "Those that forget history... are condemned to somebody else's version."

As an example: two young neo-Nazis -- is there any other kind? -- came around, full of agression and fear and exuding curiosity about The Desert Peach. They both ended up picking up copies. True, they both put their copies under their shirts, but at least they had them. Get a neo-Nazi away from the rest of his gang -- the only one that supports and believes him, in his fear -- and you may soon find a youngster who just wants answers. Any answers. Neo-Nazis are like gangbangers; they're looking for something strong and stable. And you know what you can find that's strong in a stable.

My Jewish readers want to know more about WWII than the catastrophe to their people. Their wholesale murder didn't take place in a social vacuum, as is often portrayed. They didn't go into the camps alone; the first people who did go were Germans -- political prisoners -- who sometimes returned after having their attitudes rectified. There was no real traceable reason for the Jews' tragedy, except starvation and overcrowding and the hunt for scapegoats -- ancient and immutable causes for tribal decimation. The world didn't just stand still and watch what was done to them, in a silent shock that might as well have been approval. The world, sadly enough, was so busy ripping itself to pieces, and fighting for its own needs and concerns, that the Jews were swept up and trampled and thrown away in the rush.

No one notices or cares about the smell of the camp up the road when their own city is burning.

I love getting mail from my Jewish readers, and being approached by them in public; those people have got a grip on WWII that won't quit, and they're hungry for more. In San Diego, I'm usually ambushed by a reader who puts on her very thickest New York Yiddish accent, and says, "I never t'ought I wood luhv a Nahzi." It always cracks me up. And it's the only time I hear the word Nazi and not want to demand it to be defined.

For example, issue #13 of The Desert Peach is brilliant. You begin to confront some of the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Yet you also deal very well with the myriad of very real reasons that people might not rise to the occasion and try to stop them. And the book is funny too. Rommel's tirade about the misuse of trains is priceless, and perfectly in character for the great General. What motivated you to move to the darker realities of the war? Had you planned to get to that all along?

The story came and I wrote it down. I'm not in control of it. Sometimes it's light, sometimes it's dark. It comes when it comes. I have some very light hearted stories to tell. And some very, very ugly ones. I'm not going to apologize, because I'm not doing it.

"You begin to confront some of the atrocities of Nazi Germany." This is such a strange comment. It sounds as though somehow these atrocities were unknown, and I'm revealing them. But they've been -- pardon the horrible pun, but I can't help phrasing it like this -- done to death in our literature. They're in all the movies, and all the books. What am I doing that's new? How am I "confronting" something that you watch in a special every time you turn on PBS television? If anything, this is the first issue where I just go with the flow. I don't think I deserve the credit. You might even be able to accuse me of slapping in the most acceptable plot line, to keep critics off my back -- everybody gets poisoned by publishing. Nazis are profitable, stick a camp in a book and people will think you're profound. In Israel, exploiting the Jewish tragedy for your own ends is called "Holo-Kitsch."

That's what it looks like, even though I know it was really just another case of waking up in the middle of the night, and being confronted with another movie running through my head. There were atrocities and great decency and great horror and tragedy and great humor, on both sides of the war. It doesn't seem to me honest, just or healthy to suppress any of it, but that's what all we humans do. I would have said that, in the long run, it does only harm. Except that, in the long run, it won't matter. But like the rest of my species, I fool myself with hope for all of us. This may be as close as I get to religion.

"The myriad of reasons that people might not rise to the occasion" -- Well, that wasn't hard. I live with that every day. In The Desert Peach, I just reinterpret what I see. It's really an autobiographical book. Witness -- again: I was riding on a Seattle city bus, happily buried in a 19th-century German language -- Fraktur -- novel of light military humor, when the large male who sat down beside me, after having examined the pages over my shoulder, asked, "What language is that in?"

"Oh -- it's German."

I might as well have dropped the acid into the cyanide. He raised his voice to inform me -- and everyone on the bus -- that if he had been living at that time, he would have hid Jews in his attic, and he would have defied the Gestapo. So there! After I got over the initial confusion, I asked -- sadly enough, I must admit I raised my voice, too -- "Yeah? How commendable. So how many El Salvadorans you got hiding in your basement?"

That shut him up. And you had to have been there to see the weird startled, inner-turning looks on the faces of the rest of the riders. A whole busload of people had just had their minds kicked open. You could practically hear their skulls crack.

I think I'm getting hooked on intellectual concussions. This may not be healthy.