What I'm finding is that when I try to impose things intellectually on this material - let's not forget that the point of Tyrant is, I'm trying to get to that reptile brain that we all have. I want to strip away layers of artifice to arrive at something that feels, on a gut level, very true to me. Not true just in terms of scientific accuracy, but true as a story. That becomes part of the process as well. I can give you a very concrete example: For the chapter I'm muddling through, "Dreams and Bones," I wanted to come up with a visual metaphor for life in the egg, because this whole chapter of Tyrant is about that conclusion of the birth process - leaving the egg. I was looking for something to give visual and emotional form to what Tyrant has just given up, and that immediately suggested animals in shells. For much of the spring I struggled with a whole lengthy sequence that is not in that book at all - I saved the art and I'll probably run it as a side story later - with a snail. It seemed very logical to me, but the further I got into the completed art, the more I realized how inadequate that was, and something that will seem in hindsight stupidly obvious asserted itself: a turtle. The turtle became a character, as these things do, and it took me some time to do the hard research on what turtles lived in North America at the period of time that T. rex lived; specifically, a turtle that could withdraw its head all the way into its shell. Most of the turtles at that time were sideneck turtles, who actually sort of tuck their head into the shell, with a bit of their neck portruding, or the softshell turtles, which didn't fit my story requirements either. As I say, all this is going to seem absurd to the people reading this interview in hindsight, but that took time to work out as well.

I honestly don't know what Tyrant's schedule is going to be. I've obviously given up on Tyrant being bi-monthly; I hope most of my readers have, without giving up on Tyrant. But I have worked diligently every day on Tyrant, I've done well enough with Tyrant that I haven't had to take on side jobs. The focus has been absolute; I've never had this kind of focus on my work in my life. These fucking interviews are a distraction, though.

By the way, the organic growth of the chapter that turned from a single issue, what was issue #4, into #4, #5, and #6, mirrors exactly what happens to Tyrant #1, #2, and #3. What is now Tyrant #3, the whole issue that takes place in the egg, was originally issue #1, and then all the front story started to assert itself there. So if the people reading this interview can imagine Tyrant without those first two issues, you'll have some idea of how important this is to me in my growth as a storyteller. I don't think that the issue that now is #3 would have had nearly the dramatic impact I hope it has without those first two issues setting up everything about the nest, the mother, where we are, what creatures live around them. I'm hoping this isn't a pattern that I'm going to be fighting my way through for the next 15 years [laughs], but it may be. It may be that when I'm planning a chapter, it may just turn out to be the germ of a chapter. This may be my creative cycle. I'm hoping it's not!

I didn't want to approach these beliefs in the way that, say, John Gardner did with the novel, Grendel, where Grendel has this very sophisticated and self-aware voice. I think it was in Ken Kesey's novel Sometimes a Great Notion where a chapter is told from the point of view of the family's hunting dog. It was this wonderful impressionistic sketch of the thought patterns of this dog. I hope I'm not mis-identifying the novel, but that's my memory of it. And that really locked in my head. My last trip to England was about three or four years ago. I spent a week with Neil and Mary Gaiman, and about a week with Alan in Northampton. By that time I had actually started work on Tyrant, the first pages I had drawn in November of 1991. (That's what became Tyrant #3, with the egg.) So I had some stuff to show when I went to England, and I talked about the project in some depth with Neil and Alan. Prior to that I had had a couple of long conversations with Scott McCloud - Scott and [his wife] Ivy used to live in Amherst, Mass., and we became really close. Those are the three people that I talked to when I was looking for a voice for the Tyrant book. By the time I went out to England, I'd decided that there was going to be a narrative voice, which had to be, by necessity, rather dispassionate. That is the calm, cool, detached narrative voice that you're reading in Tyrant as it now exists. I also felt the need to shift gears as a writer, to put you in an animal's head for a second, without having to have some sort of narrative conceit to put you there. I want to be able to jump in there, insidiously, as I did with a sequence in book #2. If it works when you read it, at first you think I'm talking about this tyrannosaurus rex, who has something in her mouth --

I just finished a review that I'm running in Tyrant #5 for Robert T. Bakker's first novel, Raptor Red. It was a hard review to write because it touched upon the reasons I'm doing Tyrant as a comic instead of a prose novel - I could have done it as a prose piece, and I'd have had no trouble selling it - was those fucking Latin names [laughs]! Your eye stops dead on a page when you're confronted with a word like "velociraptor," or "tyrannosaurus rex." I don't care how well versed you are, how natural those words seem if you're a dinosaur nut - it stops your eye dead. With comics, I don't have to name these creatures; I show them. If I'm careful with my writing, I can put you in that world. That's why doing it in comics is most important to me. I think it's a perfect medium to tell this story.

So, in this new phase of rebirth, reawakening, and reform as an individual, Tyrant is an ideal vehicle for my exploring and expressing that interior reality. Tyrant is also about mortality, which concerns me more now that I am in my forties. I've already lost two dear friends this year. The interpersonal exchange I have with Tyrant is a fuller and more honest merger of my personal and creative lives than I've ever experienced. That energy and sense of adventure is, I think, visible in my drawing one again, and it feels great. As I said earlier, things are tight at times, it's feast or famine, but it's all I have to do now. And I just love the drawing. You're probably seeing the purest love of drawing that I've ever demonstrated in this field since I began working in it professionally. You just have to be patient between issues. I enjoy the process more than the final product.

One of the things that happened when I was doing Swamp Thing was, Alan, John, and I were having a fucking blast when we were doing the series story-by-story. Some of them were two-issue stories, some were one-issue stories, but we didn't know where we were going next; we were just on the ride. When Alan came up with "American Gothic," it regimented our progress. There was this procession of issues - here's our ghost story, here's our werewolf story - and my passion dried up, and not just because of all the business difficulties with DC that I can't talk about. It was also that creatively we had boxed ourselves in. So with Tyrant I'm leaving myself room in every issue to see where the story takes me. To my mind, some of the best pages I've done were things that, at four o'clock that afternoon, I didn't even imagine I was going to do, and at six o'clock that night I was frantically getting it down so that by next morning the page would be done enough that I could come in and roll on what had hit me that afternoon at 5 p.m. I've never given myself that sort of creative latitude. I've always worked in this field with the parameters most cartoonists and writers in this field work with: You have eight pages to tell your story. Or you have 24 pages to tell your story. Or you have three issues to tell your story. And it has to be done next week. I'd never given myself the breathing room to cut loose, and I was almost always involved in a collaborative venture. So, I'm looking at 15 years, maybe 20.