Ted Naifeh

I think about 'The Simpsons,' which has been going on for 25 years. Homer is still in his late 30's. Lisa is 8, Bart is 10. Their stories are told. Yet the series keeps going on and on like a zombie that won't lie down and die. That feels forced and unnatural. The characters never change, grow, age.

Basically, Urban Fantasy means D&D in New York. Ordinary people have no idea that they share the world with fantastic, supernatural creatures. It can't just be vampires or werewolves; it has to be a whole continuum of fantastic beings, with their own society within society.

I hear all the time that boys don't like stories about girls. Which never made much sense to me. Wasn't 'Terminator' about a girl? And 'Alien'? Hell, I grew up on 'The Wizard of Oz.' People enjoy stories about anything if they're good stories.

I'd say I'm a pretty intense person. I'm definitely not my Denise character on 'Scrubs,' nor my Jane character on 'Happy Endings,' but I'm a mix of the two. I really feel that I'm kind of every character that I've ever played; it's just a part of me. And I am a bit of a control freak like Jane. I'm very, perhaps, obsessive like that.

There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They're like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages.