Ryan North

“No offense to real jobs, but comics seemed a lot more fun.”

“I thought there was something inherently interesting in people turning to gold. It's pretty cool.”

“The great thing about online comics is that this happens naturally, even if you don't advertise.”

“I never actually watched 'Teletubbies.' Maybe I missed out.”

“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.”

“Being online works really well for any creative work, but especially comics.”

“It's like jazz: You learn the rules to break them - as long as you can break them in a meaningful way.”

“'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“This is why it's hard to talk about winning awards. You can't do it without sounding like a tool.”

“When I graduated, I sort of went from school to being a cartoonist, and I couldn't draw.”

“You can always take on more projects; it just makes your life worse and worse.”

“You can have an idea that everyone else thinks is dumb, and it's still a good idea.”

“I'd hate to be writing 'Adventure Time' comics and not be excited about it.”

“You care a lot about these stories you're writing, and you hope that someone else will care, too.”

“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.”

“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.”