I don't want to be one of these people who's like, "Man, I don't know where my ideas come from and I don't know why this works."

I just wanted a really simple, dramatic way so that fans, people who were reading my comic, would be like, "This is something different." Just to flag it, almost.

I started sharpening pencils at the census and how that was a difficult time in my life because my marriage was ending and I had quit cartooning and I didn't know what to do with myself.

I hate self-publishing; it's a real drag and it takes up a lot of space.

I wanted to get paid to sharpen pencils originally just because I thought it would be fun.

I never thought I would make a living as a pencil-sharpener. The first goal was: I don't want to lose money. And then the goal was: I want to see if 100 people buy my pencils. I just kept upping the benchmarks.

I would make a comic for Rolling Stone every two weeks, because they're biweekly. And then I would make weekly comics for my weekly papers. It was on two parallel tracks. And then they all got collected in a book.