When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.

I think when I finally got it in my head that I was going to do the story, I wanted to avoid doing what I thought people wanted me to do.

When people see me struggling on paper, I think it invites an almost collaborative relationship with the outside world, and that includes readers and other artists.

I wanted all the responsibility to rest on the content of the story. I tried to make the visual style almost invisible.

I've always been really impressed with some of the longer graphic novels and thought it would be really amazing if one day I could try something like that.

There were certainly some people who wanted me to do a feel-good story that affirmed a lot of very commonly held beliefs.

I wanted to try to create characters that happen to be Asian but who are pretty different from those we generally see in our culture, in our commercial culture.