It's psychologically a weird experience to be so aware of the fact that the real time of your life is moving much faster than the fictional time you're trying to depict. You start to feel very weighted down sometimes.

I was just a guy who did adult or alternative comic books. And then suddenly to be, like, a New Yorker cover artist was a different thing.

When I talk to people who have teenagers now, their rooms are filled with screens. There are their phones and their DVD players and TVs and all these things to produce distractions for them, and I think it would be hard to find the time to create something. I think that's really changing something about adolescence.

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.

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

There's also an immediacy to everything that has changed everybody's expectations. Now if I can't get a hold of somebody on their cell phone I'm, like, angry with them. And in my mind, all the things that I really value in terms of art, really good novels or films or comics, I know they all take a long, long time to create, and they take a lot of concentration and dedication...and I just feel like the training for that is becoming more and more rare when people are used to seeing things like YouTube clips, and being able to acquire things instantly.

Underground and alternative comics existed in a vacuum for years, where money really wasn't an issue. No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.