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

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 get the impression from some people that unless they get direct access to characters' thoughts and realizations, either through thought balloons or narrations or some sort of showy action, then those thoughts and realizations never existed.

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 do think it's getting more and more rare in this country to raise a kid with the attitude that creativity is something valuable. The idea of trying to make the effort to produce something, to put something out into the world, rather than just taking in all the stuff the world's putting out at you.

I wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience.

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.