Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

I think with most things online, if you treat your audience like friends instead of like Impressions and Clickthrough Percentages and Returns On Investment, then you're off to a great start.

There are so many ways to make a book or comic, but most involve doing something online.

It's like jazz: You learn the rules to break them - as long as you can break them in a meaningful way.

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!

Social media has been a great change. It's also a great way to disseminate comics and market them.

It turns out childbirth is really... messy.

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 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'm totally applying assumed Creative Commons rights and ripping this post from Jason verbatim, since it says everything I want to.

I never actually watched 'Teletubbies.' Maybe I missed out.

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.

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

There's only one Squirrel Girl!

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.