That was the appealing thing about comics: There literally is no budget in comics. You're only limited by your imagination.

We're always looking roughly 30 years behind us. In the '80s they were obsessed with the '50s and so on.

I genuinely am sort of an emotionally stunted man-child, so if I just write to the top of my intelligence, it sounds like a teenager. I like being around teenagers. It's good for drama; they feel everything much more intensely than adults do, their lives are much more interesting than ours. They're mutants. They have these weird bodies that are rebelling against them and changing every day. Teenagers always equal good drama.

Each collected edition of Paper Girls that we put out will largely be set in an entirely different era.

I realized that for fantasy and science fiction, especially from my youth, white was the default. Luke Skywalker was in the lead, or even if you were a hobbit, you're going to be white. That was an extremely old-fashioned, obviously really narrow-minded way to look at things.

After 9/11, I knew I wanted to write about power and identity and the way Americans on all sides of the political spectrum often mythologize our leaders, which are themes that the superhero genre has always handled really well.

To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint.