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.

You know comics and movies even if you take a comic and turn it into a movie we can't all be Joss Whedon.

I'm not sure anybody's ready to see me in a drama. And loving movies so much I've seen a lot of comics try to make that transition too fast and it can be detrimental. And I don't think I've had as much success as I need in the comedy genre to open up those opportunities.

That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

We didn't have television until I was about eight years old so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things and the comics that I immersed myself in as a child.

Stand-up comics reflect less of a visual humor and more of a commentary.

The comics that are just conversing with you up there and drawing on their own life yeah I guess so. I guess some do political humor some do topical humor but the ones that I like the ones that are appealing to me were guys who were just talking to you about their life.

We are in the comics the last frontier of good wholesome family humor and entertainment.

Sometimes comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them because I get the joke right but I can't get the character right and it just goes down like a lead balloon.

The misconception is that standup comics are always on. I don't know any really funny comics that are annoying and constantly trying to be funny all the time.

People ask 'do you make a conscious effort not to swear?' - if you're doing silly stuff you're not tempted to put swearing in. All the comics from my childhood who were funny without swearing were the people that influenced me. What I do is quite traditional anyway.

I always like to watch comics and it's interesting that you can tell if someone's funny in 10 seconds.

Some people can do things and get away with it. Comics are famously like that. Why is it that some guys can say the most horrible things and it's not offensive it's funny?

I've thought for the last decade or so the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages and had the ability to make it all funny entertaining and pertinent.

So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for and sometimes winning and sometimes losing the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and more generally for freedom of speech.