When I talk to people who have teenagers now, their rooms are filled with screens. There are their phones and their DVD players and TVs and all these things to produce distractions for them, and I think it would be hard to find the time to create something. I think that's really changing something about adolescence.
Underground and alternative comics existed in a vacuum for years, where money really wasn't an issue. No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.
A lot of the kinship that people notice is not coincidental. I was very impressionable and trying to find my role models when I was twelve or thirteen.
I think a lot of the bells and whistles that become available to you would be impossible to resist for some people, so it's just never going to be a real stand-in version of your comic. People will have to take advantage of the ability to have sound, or zoom in and out, whatever it is.
I set myself up for a lot of trouble by wanting to tell a story that is fairly earnest and emotional and expressive, but to do it in the most subtle, realistic way.
I get nervous about the effect that the high speed of everything will have on creativity. It's already sad for me to see that a lot of young aspiring cartoonists are putting stuff on the web, doing animation on the computer rather than making zines or mini-comics, which seem to be going the way of the dinosaur.
I wanted to try to create characters that happen to be Asian but who are pretty different from those we generally see in our culture, in our commercial culture.
When people see me struggling on paper, I think it invites an almost collaborative relationship with the outside world, and that includes readers and other artists.
For me, like, the more interesting a letter is I just get more excited and I know that this going to be great for my friends who are looking forward to reading that in my comic.
There are certain artists and filmmakers who, I get the impression, are trying to show off how bad their characters can be, how immoral their characters can be.
I was very aware of the fact that there are a lot of comics out there that I love, because I've grown up my whole life reading comics and I know every little nuance of the language and all the implications.
I get the impression from some people that unless they get direct access to characters' thoughts and realizations, either through thought balloons or narrations or some sort of showy action, then those thoughts and realizations never existed.