the following interview was conducted on april 24th, 2005.

gary groth: It seems to me that you had a pretty early preoccupation with formal aspects of comics.

paul hornschemeier: Yeah, definitely.

gg: Did your studying philosophy have anything to do with that, do you think?

Portrait from sketcbook, after Steve Ditko

gg: Sequential appeared between '99 and 2001; who were the cartoonists you were looking at...

ph: Really, initially, it was just Dan Clowes, he was the only person that I had much exposure to because there was one record store that carried Eightball, and that was one reason I was able to get a hold of his stuff. I think...

gg: It certainly seems like Chris Ware might have had an influence at some point.

ph: You know, that's the funny thing, I've been compared to Chris a million times over, and I think the first time I saw him... I read about the existence of Chris Ware in this book that I bought because it has an interview with Dan Clowes in it; I found out about Chris, and I think that was probably, oh God, I don’t know, I know I was on at least Sequential #4 or #5 or something like that. So I think that the really weird experimental stuff that I did I'd already done before I saw one of his books. I did special order one of his books while I was still living in Columbus and that was the first one I got, I think the next few I got I actually got here in Chicago.

from sketchbook

gg: In terms of the content of your stories, your major preoccupation seems to be with familial relationships.

ph: It was only pretty recently that I realized that [laughs].

gg: Is that right?

ph: Yeah. I don't know, I don't know what that's about [laughs]. But it's definitely true. I think essentially that when I was growing up, that was really the group that I hung out with, I mean I hung out with my two sisters and my parents most of the time, I didn't really have as many friends, because, there was a lot of reasons, I was a total dork, but we just really didn't fit into to Georgetown all that well, because where I came from a lot of people had the hick accent, [in hick accent] "talked like that," you know. [Laughter.]

gg: There's an interior quality to your best and most recent work.

ph: Right, and I think what has always been the most interesting to me is that there's this exterior reality and then the interior reality of what's going on inside people's houses and inside their minds...