I certainly wasn't consciously hiding my identity in the earlier work, though a lot of people have brought up the fact that I drew myself without eyeballs.

For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy who was trying to be cool by writing about young people and a certain kind of Bay Area culture that I was tangentially a part of.

One of the by-products of being allowed to start my professional career prematurely is that the evolution of my work is really evident.

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.

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'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.

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