Ryan North Quotes

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

It turns out childbirth is really… messy.

I actually put Jubilee in ‘Squirrel Girl.’ I made it a priority.

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

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.

Yes, I’ve won prizes for putting words on a computer.

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.

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

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.

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.

There’s tons of people doing awesome things with comics online – I’m just one dude!

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!

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.

For me personally, I get to be a cartoonist, because my comic would never survive in print. Maybe one in 100 people would like it, but online, I can gather that one percent all in one place.

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.

I never actually watched ‘Teletubbies.’ Maybe I missed out.

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.

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

I’d hate to be writing ‘Adventure Time’ comics and not be excited about it.

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

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.

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

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.

Sometimes I feel like I must be hinting at this deep well of knowledge when, really, I just skim off the surface.

With ‘Machine of Death,’ we became the #1 bestselling book on Amazon in a single day.

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.

There’s only one Squirrel Girl!

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

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.’

It’s a lot harder for an author that’s unpublished to say, ‘Hey, here’s a new book.’ There’s nothing of theirs to read, so you don’t know what it’s going to be like. Kickstarter is great, but you also have to put your work out there whenever you can so you can build a reputation.