I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. I always wanted to pursue either music or comics, so when the opportunity came from comics publisher Fantagraphics for my brothers Jaime and Mario and I to make a comic book together, we jumped at the chance: "Let's just do it and see what happens." Really, we weren't sure where we were going to go with it. We thought our work was good enough to be out there, but we didn't know that the response was going to be pretty good, pretty quick.

I've always been interested in the way males seem to need to start clubs, or cults, to keep girls out until they need them for sex. It comes from some weird immature tribal crap, I'm sure.

It takes time to learn to draw. It takes years, not a few weeks.

Anyone could identify with the human aspect of the characters.

I've dealt with Hollywood about having my work made into a film or cartoon but nothing came of it. That's not to say I wouldn't like to see something happen.

I grew up being really insecure and dumped on, over-feeling certain things in a negative way. So I thought I had something to prove.

I had always shown childhood as something difficult, something you want to get the hell out of, but now I wanted to do a story that was the opposite, about that moment in time when you're in that world of discovery, doing what you want to do. That fleeting moment when you're in your zone.