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.
Ryan North
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.
I actually put Jubilee in 'Squirrel Girl.' I made it a priority.
When I graduated, I sort of went from school to being a cartoonist, and I couldn't draw.
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.
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.
I do actually do good work! And it's hard! And I'm worth it!
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.
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.
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!'
Sometimes I feel like I must be hinting at this deep well of knowledge when, really, I just skim off the surface.
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.
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.
You can have an idea that everyone else thinks is dumb, and it's still a good idea.
I see Jughead as being generally this really rational dude, this anchor of sensibility in a world of boy/girl-crazy friends.
The idea of taking command of your life and doing something that you're not sure if you can do and you're not really sure if you should do it, I think is pretty timeless. We all face those doubts often, if not constantly.
With 'Machine of Death,' we became the #1 bestselling book on Amazon in a single day.
Social media has been a great change. It's also a great way to disseminate comics and market them.
I never actually watched 'Teletubbies.' Maybe I missed out.
I'd hate to be writing 'Adventure Time' comics and not be excited about it.
There's only one Squirrel Girl!
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.
The fun thing about writing a book with multiple paths and multiple endings is you really get to explore the characters and figure out their different fates.
The first mp3 I downloaded, which I guess was illegal, was a symphonic rendering of the Super Mario Brothers 1-1 theme song. It was great. I was like, 'This is blowing MIDI files out of the water. This is the future, right here.'
Librarians are awesome; I don't care who knows it.
It's good to have hobbies.
This is why it's hard to talk about winning awards. You can't do it without sounding like a tool.
I thought there was something inherently interesting in people turning to gold. It's pretty cool.
I believe good writing can save bad art.
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.
My first book, 'To Be or Not To Be,' took 'Hamlet' and converted it to the choose-your-own-path format. It was a great fit for a book where you control what happens - a book as game - because the plot of 'Hamlet' is very game-like: get a mission from a ghost to kill the final boss, kill the final boss, and game over. You win.
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.
Your worst enemy as a writer - especially one working online a lot of the time - is obscurity.
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.
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.
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.
You can do so much crazy stuff with books that isn't necessarily being done. That's how culture stays alive - by doing new things with it.
The nice thing with Shakespeare from a modern point of view is that a lot of stuff that was tragic for him can read as comic for us.
I think the best villains are ones that you can look at and say, 'Yeah, he's obviously going about this the wrong way or going too far or whatever, but I can see where he's coming from.' Magneto's a great example of that, and the reason he and Charles Xavier can have such great conversations is that they can both make some good points.
A shot-down advance doesn't have to mean the end of a relationship, right? You can still be friends, as long as you're not dumb about it.
You care a lot about these stories you're writing, and you hope that someone else will care, too.
I've always found it funny when people call 'Romeo and Juliet' 'the greatest love story ever told' because - man - it does not work out well for those kids, you know? I'd like to think the greatest love story ever told would at least let them be together for more than a few hours.
If you're going to be adapting something across media, you should at least have the moves that people want you to hit and that you want to hit.
Yes, I've won prizes for putting words on a computer.
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.
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!
No offense to real jobs, but comics seemed a lot more fun.
Being online works really well for any creative work, but especially comics.
You have to recognize as a creative person that not everyone's going to be into what you're doing.
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.
