Taylor McKimens: Most of the Mexican-style stuff that I looked at was the Chicano gang-member-style drawings. It was more like border culture stuff. I think being from down there, what was more important to me was that I didn’t really know about “art” my whole childhood until I got to art school. I think that sort of … I know there’s a lot of people from New York that grew up with being exposed to art and their parents used to take them to museums and stuff. But all I really had was just weird paintings of cactuses and coyotes.

Did you make comics when you were a kid? Were you always drawing?

Yeah. But that was basically the same thing. There were some comic books. Not that many, like not anything I like nowadays, but always really mainstream, superhero stuff. I always figured I would do that so I used to make a bunch of them. That and cartooning. I used to make cartoons for the paper, like Gary Larson or Jim Davis. I always figured I’d do something like that. That was the main thing I always wanted to do, a daily comic strip, but then I realized I just don’t have that kind of sense of humor. My comics were not funny (laughing). I mean, even worse than most of those comic strips, which aren’t really that funny anyways. But mine were even worse (laughing). So I figured comic books would be better, since other people write them and you just draw them. So I used to draw a bunch of comics.

Is that why you decided to go to art school? Was that your definite goal?

Yeah. My high school had only three catalogs from art schools in the counselors’ office (laughing) and they were all like, The Art Institute International or something.

Oh no … what is that?

That’s like one of those schools that advertises at midnight on TV, “Come be an artist!”

[Laughing] Like “Draw this parrot and send it back to us?”

Yeah, exactly [laughing]. So I figured that didn’t sound good. So between those three catalogues there was one of them that actually had a comic book page in it that someone had done at the school. I figured if someone could do that and the school was so behind it that they would put it in their catalogue that was probably the school for me. That was the Art Institute of Seattle, which is actually a pretty bad school [laughing].

Isn’t that where you were born?

Yeah. I had some family there. But that was also right around the tail end of grunge. I’d never really heard about many movements, but that’s one that got to my town. People knew about Nirvana and Pearl Jam. So I thought it must be a pretty interesting place.

If it reached that far it must be big… 

[Laughing] Yeah.