gg: Are you pretty optimistic about the future of cartooning, the future of your own work?

ph: If we take that in the void of what's going on in the world, sure. [Laughs.] Because am I optimistic in general? No. But, I would certainly say that provided we're all still here. It certainly seems like comics, particularly in North America, are really experiencing a decent amount of boom time. It certainly seems like things are being better received by the press, there is a little bit less mention of superheroes and the "zap, pow, boom" kind of crap when people write about more literary comics. I'm definitely pretty optimistic about it.

I do feel like things are being better received; nothing against cartoonists who do this, but a lot of people go on about how everyone hates cartoonists; I really don't think that's true. When I tell people that I'm a cartoonist, that's actually pretty warmly received by pretty much everybody. There's maybe a negative stigma to being a comic fan to some degree after you explain what kind of stuff you're into, but I really feel like a lot of that stuff is starting to fall by the wayside. I think that's one thing that's good about the more recent crop you have coming through now, these are people, just everyday people that I don't think anybody could call any of us more freakish than the next person. It seems like there's a more diversified field... I mean, it's not as ghettoized as it used to be, I think, and that's starting to be true of the talent pool as well, these are people that aren't necessarily like "Oh, we're crazy counterculture types," or something like that.

In France, buying a comic is just like buying a CD. I would go into a Virgin Megastore and there's the CDs, there's the DVDs, and there's the entire floor of comics. I think we're moving toward that here, albeit slowly.

Sketchbook image

gg: That's a good description of the readership.

ph: I do think it will grow, obviously it is going to be a gradual thing, certainly with people like Chris [Ware] and Dan [Clowes] getting more mainstream attention and people in general getting more attention through things. I'm pretty hopeful about things.

gg: Your next book is The Three Paradoxes. How's that going?

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I was hoping I'd finish by the end of April. Now I don't know, I don't think it's going to happen, because there were some pages that I was fine with, and then once I got toward completion, certain pages weren't even working. This is easily the most bizarre book I've ever done.

gg: The Three Paradoxes also revolves around a father and son. I haven't seen much of this, but it certainly looks like it's about a father and son, which was very much what Mother, Come Home was about, and it also looks like you're pushing the formal structural elements —

ph: This one is pushing that far more than Mother, Come Home. Mother, Come Home, in my opinion, had certain formal elements that were being messed with; this one is very, very much doing that.

gg: There's a postmodern narrative element to it, isn't there, where the narrator is a cartoonist who's working on a story that interweaves with his own story...

A panel from The Three Paradoxes

gg: What purpose do you think that serves in terms of narrative?

ph: For me, it's all trying to convey what we talked about before, trying to convey things without really saying them. Switching to other styles or doing something else is, for me, trying to evoke something without coming right out and saying, "Oh yes, and this is how you should feel." If there's anything I absolutely want to stay away from, it's smacking people over the head in this Spielberg-esque kind of way, like "OK, here's where you should cry, here's where you should do this." Because that's just ugly and dirty and manipulative, but then again, what I'm doing is manipulative; I guess I just want to be secretly manipulative. [Laughs.]

It's hard to put a finger on, but there's about five distinct narratives going on in the book, but they all share this common theme about what is — I don't want to give much away?

gg: Give a little away.

ph: I would say the gist of the book is looking for some kind of control or certainty in life, debating whether or not that actually exists; whether or not one can actually influence anything, whether one can take control of various aspects of one's life; whether one can change from where one has been in the past. I guess that's a long gist. Those are the sort of things that run through the book. Most of it's just me, but there's also fictionalized parts and parts with pre- Socratic philosophers and hopefully it all makes sense in the end.

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