In the old days, I just could not leave characters alone. Now I just try to keep the ones that still have something in the way of stories to tell.

I like doing whatever interests me. It's a challenge for me to try to make good comics out of any genre I tackle. I trust my instincts in getting me through the more difficult genres for modern readers, like violent crime or horror stories.

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 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 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 happen to think Latinas, Latin women, are the most beautiful women in the world. So that's what I'm going to draw. I love women from all cultures, of course, but if I was going to deal with any of them, that would be No. 1 for me.

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.