I think when I finally got it in my head that I was going to do the story, I wanted to avoid doing what I thought people wanted me to do.

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.

When people see me struggling on paper, I think it invites an almost collaborative relationship with the outside world, and that includes readers and other artists.

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.

There are certain artists and filmmakers who, I get the impression, are trying to show off how bad their characters can be, how immoral their characters can be.

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'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.