Silent Theater is simply the brand name I chose to put on my comics, but it's also kind of a personal idea. I started out in theater, and even though I´m not really active in it anymore, I still love the form. I learned a lot about visual thinking from doing scene design, and most of my favorite writers happen to be playwrights. I love reading comics, but I think I´ve probably been influenced as a writer mostly by playwrights. And for me, comics represents a fusion of fiction and theater, so forget the term "graphic novel," and start thinking "graphic drama."

In both comics and drama, I especially admire writers whose work seems to come from some strange world that I´ve never been to. If you like Moebius, Ben Katchor, or Gilbert Hernandez's more experimental work, you'll also probably like The Balcony by Jean Genet, The Castle by Howard Barker, or The Grace of Mary Traverse by the unfortunately named Timberlake Wertenbaker.

I also want to mention that the Silent Theater logo shows a scene from the old Punch and Judy puppet play, in which Punch beats the devil with a stick. (Almost every scene in Punch and Judy ends with Punch beating someone with a stick.) There´s a small paperback edition of this play with drawings by George Cruikshank, one of the best Victorian illustrators. If you can find it, get it, the play is a scream and the drawings are great. There's also a great Neil Gaiman/Dave McKean graphic novel that takes its cue from this play--Mr. Punch, which I'd highly recommend.