I was a pretty good reader in elementary school. And I remember being super excited to learn in kindergarten, because I would watch television and at the end of the cartoon they’d show the credits, and I remember thinking, like, someday I’ll understand what that means. So you know, my first early reader books felt like a huge accomplishment, and I always loved listening to stories, and my mom did a ton of reading to us when we were growing up. So, you know, books were a gift, and I was excited to learn to read and write from a pretty early age, and then once I started, I also started reading comic strips in the newspaper, and so that became sort of my first and primary love when it came to reading.
Every day I would wanna catch up on my favorite comic strips, and then read the collected versions when they were published. And then in middle school, I think I was looking for what we would call YA now, and there wasn’t a whole lot of it to be found when I was a teenager, so I gravitated towards independent comics, and comics by, you know, authors that were a little bit edgier than what you would read in the newspaper.
So one of my favorite cartoonists was Linda Barry when I was growing up, and she was doing comic strips, but they were about like, messed up people with like, sad family lives and stuff. So I was getting like the pathos from her work, and I was also able to say, you know, this wasn’t my life. My life was not as difficult as these people’s lives, and it sort of helped give me context for the problems that I was going through. But I think her voice is really authentic, and really, really captures, you know, childhood and the teen years. So I kept reading, I kept making my own comics, and I think what I read really inspired what I made.
