As all C.S. students know, first year is super easy, but second year is when things get harder. At least that's how it was in my experience. And I didn't have to save the planet between classes either. Instead, I went home and studied quietly. I was a party animal.
— Ryan North
With 'Machine of Death,' we became the #1 bestselling book on Amazon in a single day.
There are so many ways to make a book or comic, but most involve doing something online.
Social media has been a great change. It's also a great way to disseminate comics and market them.
Sometimes I feel like I must be hinting at this deep well of knowledge when, really, I just skim off the surface.
I believe that a good comic script can succeed despite being drawn badly, but that a bad script can't be saved by good art. Of course, great writing and great illustration makes for a great comic 100 percent of the time.
A huge potential audience, great interaction with your readers, the ability to see what people like and what they don't, the ability to see how people respond to what you're doing in real-time - there's just tons of great stuff that you get by being online.
Everything I write should have lasers. That's my #1 rule.
You always hope a book's going to be a success. I don't think I've ever written a book thinking, 'This will be bad and no-one will like it!'
Squirrel Girl is basically a Silver Age character in the modern age, and that makes her a fish out of water in a lot of ways. She likes being a superhero. She likes fighting crime. She doesn't sit around brooding in the darkness of her Squirrel Hole trying to figure out new ways to make crime pay.
The challenge is to stay true to the characters while also having them be entertaining every day, because it turns out that just watching someone be true to themselves isn't that rad to watch.
Librarians are awesome; I don't care who knows it.
'Adventure Time' tells stories where anything can happen, but what happens is. It stars Finn, a boy who fights evil, and Jake, a dog with stretchy powers. Both of them can talk.
There's a difference between children's literature and all-ages literature. One is written expressly for children. The other is written for everyone, including children. And the difference usually manifests in not talking down to kids.
The funny thing with Ophelia is that I remembered her being this really cool, awesome female character when I read 'Hamlet' in high school, and when I went back and read it, no, she's not.
No offense to real jobs, but comics seemed a lot more fun.
Writing 'Jughead' in general is a pleasure because - and I think a lot of very tall guys can agree with me on this - there was a time in my teenage years where I just ate all the time and never got full.
There's only one Squirrel Girl!
I think with most things online, if you treat your audience like friends instead of like Impressions and Clickthrough Percentages and Returns On Investment, then you're off to a great start.
It's a lot harder for an author that's unpublished to say, 'Hey, here's a new book.' There's nothing of theirs to read, so you don't know what it's going to be like. Kickstarter is great, but you also have to put your work out there whenever you can so you can build a reputation.
It's like jazz: You learn the rules to break them - as long as you can break them in a meaningful way.
I believe good writing can save bad art.
The great thing about online comics is that this happens naturally, even if you don't advertise.
You can always take on more projects; it just makes your life worse and worse.
I thought there was something inherently interesting in people turning to gold. It's pretty cool.
I do actually do good work! And it's hard! And I'm worth it!
I am a big proponent of the pal-centric lifestyle.
There may be this hidden, hate-filled community of online cartoonists, but if there are, I haven't found it yet. We're all generally pretty nice people, it turns out!
As a kid, I loved the idea of alternate possibilities, roads not taken, that sort of thing - and I think seeing the 'Adventure Time' universe rendered by the artists in those stories will scratch that same itch really well.
I spent age 6-12 basically thinking about 'Back to the Future' all the time, so I think it's probably had a pretty huge influence on me and the way I think and write.
I'd hate to be writing 'Adventure Time' comics and not be excited about it.
You have to recognize as a creative person that not everyone's going to be into what you're doing.
I used to worry that I had a finite supply of ideas, that I should hold on to each of them in case it was the last. But then I talked to other cartoonists, and I realized ideas are cheap; you can have a million ideas. The tricky part is the follow-through: making good ones work, making the best out of the raw material!
I've never written a novel before, and part of the reason I haven't is I was worried about getting 50,000 words into a book and realizing I'd made a mistake on word three that would mean throwing everything out.
My goal is for a complete collection of 'Squirrel Girl' comics to be equivalent to a C.S. bachelor degree. Now there's a comic that increases in value!
There's tons of people doing awesome things with comics online - I'm just one dude!
I can see people sharing my comics and talking about them, which is very gratifying.
When I graduated, I sort of went from school to being a cartoonist, and I couldn't draw.
The nice thing about Squirrel Girl is that she's smart, and she looks for situations that don't necessarily involve punching people all the time.
For me personally, I get to be a cartoonist, because my comic would never survive in print. Maybe one in 100 people would like it, but online, I can gather that one percent all in one place.
It turns out childbirth is really... messy.
I read all these Marvel wikis, and there are characters that just stand out to you, and you think, 'How is this character not being used? This is crazy.'
What I thought would be fun would be Squirrel Girl being this computer science student, working in STEM, because you don't see a lot of characters there, never mind female characters. Also, I studied computer science, so it's not too hard to write.
In earlier comics, my only priority was telling a joke in the last panel, but now I try to make every panel as interesting as possible, and that normally means at least a li'l joke there.
I've said this before, but I think one of the reason so many of the cartoonists I know have become friends is because the Internet is a much more cooperative space.
It's actually deeply satisfying to write a story out in full.
I love the idea that if you're going to travel through time, you do it in this insanely dangerous car travelling at 88 miles per hour.
I never actually watched 'Teletubbies.' Maybe I missed out.
Being online works really well for any creative work, but especially comics.
I see Jughead as being generally this really rational dude, this anchor of sensibility in a world of boy/girl-crazy friends.
