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

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.

I'm getting to a point in my life where my whole attitude about the relationship between myself and the audience is totally different.

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

I was just a guy who did adult or alternative comic books. And then suddenly to be, like, a New Yorker cover artist was a different thing.

It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.