It's very hard for a woman in comedy. It's hard for women to be bold and not care what anyone particularly men think. Maybe that is why so many women comics are lesbians.

When I planned my wedding the first time my ex-husband and I we were both struggling comics. I had a TV show that had gotten cancelled. Basically I rented a wedding gown the reception hall smelled like feet.

There are 10-20 times more male comics than female comics it's something to do with the social structure of society.

Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.

I still collect comics. I still have a great love and respect for the genre.

Ragtime has about the same amount of respect as comics. And in a way they're similar art forms. Ragtime is highly compositional and the emotion in the music is built in whereas in jazz a lot of that emotion comes from the way it's performed.

When you're young with less on the line it's easier to be audacious to experiment. So I introduced the concerns of my generation - politics sex drugs rock-and-roll etc. - to the comics page which for many years caused a rolling furor.

Publishing the lyric books poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane Chandler Jim Thompson and noir movies like Fuller Orson Welles Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I'm a spoilt brat. I thought I was just going to walk in and make movies. But I'd been my own boss for so long that all of a sudden to be facing a roomful of people who were niggling over every little scene... I just thought I'd go back and draw my comics and have a happy life.