When I was a teenager, 'Playboy' was the most interesting magazine in the world, and not just for the playmates. I liked the interviews and the stories, and all that, but nowadays most of the stuff in there doesn't interest me.
I'd begun reading Crumb shortly before that, and other underground stuff, so that was an influence to some degree. Of course the Marvel and DC comics, they had been my main interests in my teenage years.
You kind of hope that the events themselves are interesting. I think that's what you have to hope for, that on a broad level it's an interesting story.
The counter-argument would be, so what if my sexual relationships are superficial, one can still have satisfying and rewarding relationships with friends, or parents, or siblings, or whatever.
That's the thing. in medicine, you're used to saying there's a problem within the person, and saying there's a problem within the culture, that's not a medical answer. Medicine has to look in one direction, so there's only one type of answer that they can find.
There's a bit of debate about that; some say it was really Matthew, but the popular consensus is that Mark was the first one, so that's why I did that one first. And I was planning on doing all four.
PENTHOUSE didn't seem to concentrate as much on the girls' faces, and I really wanted to see the girls' faces. It seems like through the 1980's, they almost went out of their way to obscure the girls' faces.
The whole schizophrenia angle interested me. When I first started working on it, I thought I would play up that angle more than I ended up doing. The religious aspect of the story was also a draw.
