I do make some conscious efforts to write female friendships, intergenerational female friendships. I make a conscious effort to include things that I see as important real parts of my life that are not reflected as much as I think they should be in popular culture. We very seldom have the opportunity to see women compete and remain friends.

Female Convict 701: Scorpion' is based on a manga as is 'Lady Snowblood.' I saw 'Lady Snowblood' in the theater between writing issue three and issue four of the first arc of 'Pretty Deadly,' and I was really surprised how much I was influenced by it.

If you can remove a female character from your plot and replace her with a sexy lamp and your story still works, you're a hack.

I'm not particularly good at page layouts. I make an effort to stay out of the way of the artist. What I'll try to express instead is, 'What we're going for here on this page is the idea of the containment of these women's bodies. So I want them framed as though they're bursting out of the panel borders.'

I grew up mostly in Germany, but my favorite summer trip was driving from North Carolina to Texas in a camper with my parents and us six kids.

In the '50s and '60s, a family's first child went into the priesthood, the second went into the military, and the third child was an idiot and wound up in advertising.

When people have hearing loss, I think they often take that burden and pass it on to their friends and family, and we make them scream and yell at us so we can hear! But I think it's better to take responsibility and wear hearing aids!

I always read all these books about the slaves. My mother is very educated. My father would talk to us like we were grown men. We never knew what he was talking about half the time.