Especially for people of our generation, who really celebrated certain attitudes - the outsider, the loner - it can have a real impact on the art when they realize, I have friends, I'm married, or I have kids. That's certainly happened to me.

A lot of the kinship that people notice is not coincidental. I was very impressionable and trying to find my role models when I was twelve or thirteen.

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.

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.

There were certainly some people who wanted me to do a feel-good story that affirmed a lot of very commonly held beliefs.

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."

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.