Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
'Shortcomings' was me figuring out who I am.
If something's a little weird, it's Kafkaesque.
A lot of my fears come out in my work rather than life.
I had a mundane, happy childhood, without much struggle.
For me, as much about being a parent as it is about being a child.
I'm always a little apprehensive about 'decoding' fictional stories.
I started publishing my comic while I was still living with my parents.
'Peanuts' is a life-long influence, going back to before I could even read.
To be perfectly honest, if it was up to me, I would be invisible as an artist.
When I'm sitting at my drafting table in my studio, I could really be anywhere.
Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.
The experience of reading a comic should not be the time it takes to turn each page.
My 20s were peaceful, privileged, but still I felt the desire to write angsty dramas.
It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.
I think having kids has been the biggest influence on my work since I started publishing.
I'm an unabashed fan of 'The New Yorker.' I do feel proud when I see my artwork in there.
I think the response I get to one 'New Yorker' cover outweighs five books that I publish.
There's never been a moment where I sat down at my drawing board and thought, 'I'm a pro!'
Maybe you're not even in a position to really judge how good your kid is at that endeavor.
I wanted it to be as readable as possible. I had the ambition of reaching a broader audience.
I've always published a range of responses to my work in the letters section of my comic book.
I used to live in Chris Rock's former apartment. I've got some junk mail for him if he wants it.
Fortunately, I've never had to be too critical of my own work, because the world is critical enough.
For a long time, I was very resistant to the idea of online publication or even e-books or something like that.
When email and the Internet came along, I never publish an email address. I just stuck with this P.O. Box address.
If you're changing diapers and going to the playground, any ambitions of being a cool guy have to fly out the window.
I wanted all the responsibility to rest on the content of the story. I tried to make the visual style almost invisible.
I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.
I wanted to be as invisible as possible as an artist. I wanted to differentiate between myself and who I'm writing about.
There were certainly some people who wanted me to do a feel-good story that affirmed a lot of very commonly held beliefs.
It's absolutely chilling to think that I've been working on a comic-book series called 'Optic Nerve' since I was sixteen.
I think a lot of the criticism had to do with disliking the characters - which, again, I take as something of a compliment.
You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.
I grew up with a very romantic, idealized vision of New York, probably because of all the books I read and the movies I watched.
I'm sometimes a cartoonist, and there's an audience for that, and I'm sometimes an illustrator, and there's an audience for that.
I was just taking my sketchbook to Kinko's and making photocopies and hand-assembling them - folding them over and stapling them.
I think there's a lot of evolution that's happened in intangible ways, in terms of how I think about the work or how I plan it out.
I'm getting to a point in my life where my whole attitude about the relationship between myself and the audience is totally different.
I never really thought of myself as an Asian-American cartoonist, any more than I thought of myself as a cartoonist who wears glasses.
One of the by-products of being allowed to start my professional career prematurely is that the evolution of my work is really evident.
The most impactful comics that I've read are the ones where the artists swung for the bleachers and tried to immerse you in their world.
I would honestly be elated if I could wave a magic wand and eradicate my back catalog and then have a fresh crack at some of those ideas.
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.
Ninety percent of the time when I'm working, there's this very palpable sensation that I'm doing everything wrong and should just give up.
I was just a guy who did adult or alternative comic books. And then suddenly to be, like, a New Yorker cover artist was a different thing.
It's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.
All my stories take place on the West Coast - not the beach, but smaller inland towns. I feel homesick, and I find inspiration in capturing that.
I think that if you are looking at a comic that's made by one person, that there's just a level of intimacy that I don't really see anywhere else.
It's a strange thing to be a so-called alternative cartoonist, because in the early part of my career, I was really tethered to the superhero world.
A lot of the qualities in 'Killing and Dying' is sort of a response to work I'd done previously. I wanted to push myself in some different directions.