One of the ways [racism] pops up is when they turn a comic into a live-action movie and there's this temptation to make Asian characters white.

I think reading has got so many more enemies now that graphic novels have kind of flipped over to that side.

As somebody who's kind of a technophile, I'm interested in how traditional and digital publishing connect. Maybe ten years ago they were seen as antagonists, but now they complement each other. There's data that shows digital sales actually drive print sales. And even the ways in which pictures and words, text and image, interact - we're seeing these books that are very hard to categorize. All of that is very exciting to me.

Coming from the world of comics, I was very surprised that writers and illustrators, for the most part, don't talk, and they don't collaborate.

I think a lot of us who are in books now were nervous children.

At the very core of what a comic is, time and space are kind of the same thing. When your reader moves her eyes across the page, she should be moving through time in your story.

My best teachers, the teachers who had the deepest effect on my reading, combined the two. They would mix required reading with reading where you had some choice, you had some autonomy. There's a place for both. A good teacher will know how to find that balance.