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
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.
Ryan North
There’s only one Squirrel Girl!
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
It turns out childbirth is really… messy.
Ryan North
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!’
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
Your worst enemy as a writer – especially one working online a lot of the time – is obscurity.
Ryan North
You care a lot about these stories you’re writing, and you hope that someone else will care, too.
Ryan North
It’s good to have hobbies.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.’
Ryan North
I actually put Jubilee in ‘Squirrel Girl.’ I made it a priority.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
Yes, I’ve won prizes for putting words on a computer.
Ryan North
This is why it’s hard to talk about winning awards. You can’t do it without sounding like a tool.
Ryan North
You can have an idea that everyone else thinks is dumb, and it’s still a good idea.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
I see Jughead as being generally this really rational dude, this anchor of sensibility in a world of boy/girl-crazy friends.
Ryan North
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!
Ryan North
No offense to real jobs, but comics seemed a lot more fun.
Ryan North
Being online works really well for any creative work, but especially comics.
Ryan North
You have to recognize as a creative person that not everyone’s going to be into what you’re doing.
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.
Ryan North
I never actually watched ‘Teletubbies.’ Maybe I missed out.
Ryan North
I’d hate to be writing ‘Adventure Time’ comics and not be excited about it.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
It’s actually deeply satisfying to write a story out in full.
Ryan North
Librarians are awesome; I don’t care who knows it.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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!
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North
I am a big proponent of the pal-centric lifestyle.
Ryan North
I do actually do good work! And it’s hard! And I’m worth it!
Ryan North
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.’
Ryan North
I thought there was something inherently interesting in people turning to gold. It’s pretty cool.
Ryan North
Everything I write should have lasers. That’s my #1 rule.
Ryan North
You can always take on more projects; it just makes your life worse and worse.
Ryan North
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.
Ryan North