So where did Babymouse begin? So you can take it, it started at two areas. You can say it started when we were kids because I grew up in this house with comics, and four brothers, and I was the middle child. So I was surrounded by boys and they all read comics.
And the biggest boy in the house, our dad was a huge comic book and comic strip fan, so he loved Prince Valiant and Flash Gordon, and so we actually had the bound volumes of those strips in our house when we were kids, which was pretty unheard of. So he pushed comics on us and comic strips.
And then my brothers read them, and so I read them and I loved them. But the one thing about sort of the superhero genre was there weren’t any ladies really, you know there was Superman and Batman, and Spiderman and Plastic Man and everybody. And there was Wonder Woman, but I never really identified with Wonder Woman probably because I was a normal kid, I wore clothes, and Wonder Woman runs around in her underwear.
So I just couldn’t identify with her when I was like eight or nine years old. So I was always kind of complaining that I didn’t think it was fair that there wasn’t a girl that I could relate to the way my brothers could relate to Peter Parker, you know he’s like a normal teenage boy.
And then sort of fast forward, Matt and I were both living in New York City, I was in Brooklyn, he was in Queens. And I was still working in advertising, and so I worked for many years, I worked full time and wrote. And I came home from a bad day at work and I was standing in my kitchen and I kind of had this cranky look on my face, and my husband said, “Oh, you look very irritated.”
And this image of this kind of crazy whiskered mouse popped into my head, and I drew it on a napkin, and the next time I saw Matt I gave him the napkin, and I said, “Let’s do something with this.” And then he lost the napkin, so.
Babymouse survived, and then a few years later Babymouse was published, so.
