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.

If something's a little weird, it's Kafkaesque.

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.

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.

I think a lot of the criticism had to do with disliking the characters - which, again, I take as something of a compliment.

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.

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.