For me, like, the more interesting a letter is I just get more excited and I know that this going to be great for my friends who are looking forward to reading that in my comic.

It's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.

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

Maybe you're not even in a position to really judge how good your kid is at that endeavor.

I think there's a lot of evolution that's happened in intangible ways, in terms of how I think about the work or how I plan it out.

Just in terms of being able to be a professional artist, but also it's nice to not have to dread introductions. "What you do for a living?" It used to be easier just to tell people that I was a magazine illustrator than try to explain that I did comics, but not the kind of comics that they were used to, and no, it's not pornography, etc. And now people even of our parents' generation are familiar with the term "graphic novel," which is kind of amazing.

I think a lot of the criticism had to do with disliking the characters - which, again, I take as something of a compliment.