The experience of reading a comic should not be the time it takes to turn each page.

Without fail, every cartoonist that I asked advice from bent over backward to be helpful and encouraging. It took many forms: some of it was just an implicit acceptance, like being invited along to the dinner with all of the good cartoonists, or sitting down at a drafting table with an artist and him showing me how to draw backgrounds and perspectives.

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 guess there's just a part of me that's not very enthusiastic about finding myself ten years from now halfway through a story that may or may not be any good.

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.

I think in terms of getting new artists who are not in that sort of stereotypical teenage boy demographic; there's been a lot of progress recently. And I shouldn't make a definitive statement about this, but my impression is that the main impediment to progress in that regard is the number of people who are choosing to make a go of it.

I'm always pointing things out to native New Yorkers that I think are weird about this place and their culture and all that. But I feel like my friends and family from California feel like I've totally "become a New Yorker."