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 sense a real difference in my work from the time I was younger and single and more involved in the world of music and going out to bars and all that. There were points at which I was trying to use my art to reflect positively on myself, to almost be flirtatious through the work.

You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.

And also, as a consumer now, it's weird that when I used to go to a book signing I would leave with a stack of pamphlets people had made to show off their work, and now I just leave with business cards where people have the URL to their websites.

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.

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.

I wanted all the responsibility to rest on the content of the story. I tried to make the visual style almost invisible.