most adults don't read comics. I wanted to produce something accessible to a wider audience than the regular superhero crowd, people who weren't comics-literate. It was also the biggest comics project I had ever undertaken and I deliberately set myself very specific rules - nine-panel grid, no captions, no thought-balloons, no sound effects - to try to avoid the unnecessary use of comicbook clichés. I am gradually relaxing those self-imposed rules (take a look at Strangehaven #13 and #14), but I know why I am doing it, rather than just regurgitating the status quo. Your art is quite detailed and realistic. Is this a choice you did maybe because it fits well with the surreal atmosphere of your book, or to balance the colour lack, or what else. You use photo references, don't you? I didn't intend to use such a photo-realistic approach originally. I wanted to draw in a quick, rough style in order to produce a monthly mini-comic type publication. But after I had roughed out the first sequence and I started putting the reference materials together, I naturally fell back into a photo-referenced style that I had been using on a previous aborted project, Insomnia. The art in my first issue of Strangehaven I intentionally left open for colour, as I had no idea where it would end up at that time. Maybe I was hoping it would be a Vertigo book, or serialised in a European magazine in colour (which is why the early issues are arranged in eight-page chapters), but after I started self-publishing in black and white, I naturally started rendering my artwork more heavily. When I published the trade paperback collection of the first six issues, I had to go back and add lots of grey tones to the early parts in order to balance the look across the whole volume. Again, I felt that the more representational the art was, the more likely it would be read and understood by a non-comics-literate person. It's something that I'm trying to move away from, I'm adding thicker outlines [continues]