I think when I finally got it in my head that I was going to do the story, I wanted to avoid doing what I thought people wanted me to do.

There were certainly some people who wanted me to do a feel-good story that affirmed a lot of very commonly held beliefs.

I certainly wasn't consciously hiding my identity in the earlier work, though a lot of people have brought up the fact that I drew myself without eyeballs.

And also, as a consumer now, it's weird that when I used to go to a book signing I would leave with a stack of pamphlets people had made to show off their work, and now I just leave with business cards where people have the URL to their websites.

The first time I did a reading/signing thing at Cody's, the woman who did the introduction said something like that, and I wasn't the only one cringing. I remember looking out into the audience and seeing people's faces and people whispering to each other, and thinking like "Ugh, can we just cancel the whole thing? I can't go out there after she said that."

There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.

I feel like if people are going to go to the effort to get a stamp and, you know, put it on an envelope that, you know, it's a big effort these days. So I often write back.

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.

For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy who was trying to be cool by writing about young people and a certain kind of Bay Area culture that I was tangentially a part of.