steve Holland's obit for John Ryan quotes the man himself:

"I'm a lucky man, because I've managed to earn a living by doing what I love: drawing and painting every day! And I've been supported by my wonderful wife, children and grandchildren, who've helped keep Pugwash afloat, sailing the high seas for 57 years! No matter how many other characters I create, I always seem to come back to the Captain. Pugwash has two qualities which I believe are present in all of us to some degree: Cowardice and Greed. It is the conflict between these opposing emotions which make the stories work. It may be that the Captain is popular because we all have something in common with him. What would YOU do if you saw a delicious toffee on the nose of a crocodile"

Steve Bissette cracks me up:

As a lad, I couldn’t get past the ‘tamping rod through the skull’ trauma, and for years carried the manufactured image of one Phineas Gage having to live out his life with said rod still fixed in his face and brainpan. I reckoned (as youthful men do) that it must have been carefully, tenderly sawed off top and bottom, leaving only the unremoveable portion of the bar buried cheek-to-upper-forehead forever in his head, and pondered many a night how heavy such a head would lie upon a pillow, or how easily he might have broken his neck thereafter merely by sneezing, or crueller still, by nodding off in church, as young men must and do from time to time."

Leonard Pierce at the AV Club reccommends From Hell as a first read comic or graphic novel

I'm waiting for mine in the mail