Dr. T: When the series began, Jhonen, some of the things you had to adjust to were having to do more on the management rather than creative end and having other people bring their styles to your characters. Have you been able to find ways to become more creatively involved with the show this season and put more of your personal stamp on it?

JV: Even from the very beginning I despised all the managerial kind of stuff; can't stand it. I'd rather be sitting there in my room drawing. I'd rather be turning out the character designs. I still do a bunch of character designs, and I do a lot of background work. That first season, even though there was a lot a managerial stuff, it was also compounded with several other full-time jobs in character work. I'm head writer. I'm involved in storyboards and actually going and revising storyboards, and again, doing an obscene amount of character designs. Now all I'm trying to do is keep the amount of creative involvement I have had all this time, but ease off on the managerial side, because now there are people that have shown themselves to be people I can trust to take things over for me. Ultimately I'd like to be able to focus on the writing -- as head writer -- and deal with the overall direction. I do all the voice direction too, and I'd like to stay there. But approving every little background, every design, that's the stuff where I could definitely free a lot of time up and get back to what makes it fun. Which sort of, at this very moment, it is not. It's not as often as I'd like, the amount of actual enjoyment when I'm just sitting there drawing or giggling like a lunatic over some new idea.

Dr. T: Will you eventually be directing episodes yourself?

JV: I don't know. I already do a whole lot in terms of governing what the episode is going to be like; the way the characters act -- that's me, overseeing so much of that. Now the storyboard guys are getting so great that they do all this stuff without me telling them how to do it, but it's still so much fun when I sit down with the script and the board guys. I act out key scenes and I'm telling them, "In this moment, he moves exactly like this!" just to accent that joke. In a way, I am a huge voice in what you actually end up seeing in the episode. Steve Ressel is the animation director and he does a great job of translating all of that. I do so much on the show that I don't know if I need to take on another task.

Dr. T: Steve Ressel has a terrific background in adult animation. He directed on Duckman, God, the Devil, and Bob, and one of my old favorites, Stressed Eric. What has Steve been able to bring to your material?

JV: Well, the coolest thing about Steve is -- a lot of people want to come in on this sort of thing, and they come in from other shows. Some of them are more talented than others, some of them just amazingly talented, but they always want to have a lot more of a voice in my project and what I'm doing. Coming from comics where it's just all me, well, I understand that it's necessary to work with other people but it's also necessary for the show to come as much from my head as possible. Steve does a beautiful job of translating what's in my head into animation. That's the most important thing to me. He treats it so seriously. I say, "I want it to look like a movie; like you're looking at a scene from a movie, not like a flat shot from the Sunday funnies" -- he knows what a dramatic shot is and he knows what a dramatic scene is. I need that for this show because even though it's supposed to be funny, like I always say, the more dramatically it's handled, the funnier it is because it brings a level of absurdity to the joke.

Dr. T: How did you hook up with your writing team?

JV: Currently, we've got three writers. Myself, Rob (Hummel) and Eric (Trueheart). Rob I've known for years; he's a friend of mine and a writer. I'd worked with him on writing scripts on our own, for ourselves. It seemed like a perfect fit to bring him on because he knows what I go for. He knows what I like and what I don't like. He censors himself when he knows there's something I'm going to take out anyhow; he's that much in tune with what I'm going for. And Eric? Actually, we found him when we were going through hundreds of thousands of billions of scripts when we were looking for another writer. It was just a case of us seeing his work. He had done some Internet shorts and his stuff was funny! He had never worked in animation before and had never worked in anything like television before -- and that, I love. I love the fact that a lot of these guys have never worked on any other kind of cartoon, and I can see that they're not pulling from anything else. They're not being inspired by any other show they've worked on, and there's not another definite style coming into it. It's all new to me.

Dr. T: That's as original as you can get.

JV: Yeah, that's really important to me. Some of the most important people on the show, this is our first job. It's all people who haven't been encrusted with years and years of working on other things -- you know, the ones who "know the ropes" and know what you "can't" do -- they're not afraid to try it. Which is the coolest fucking thing about these people.