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Everything about being a teenager and not feeling like you fit in is just magnified by being a mutant!

I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.

I was a very sickly kid. While I was in the hospital at age 7, my Dad brought me a stack of comic books to keep me occupied. I was hooked.

I eventually just imagined being a little boy who was quote unquote 'normal': who could learn like all the kids around me that I felt excluded from. And I imagined myself into one of these and into someone who could read.

I was encouraged to be imaginative and read, and it was a great childhood for a budding writer because I had the time and the freedom to go into a world of my own.

In the comic-book lore, of course, you mutate post a traumatic event. You must have the mutant gene, but if something traumatic happens to you, usually at puberty, then that mutation manifests itself.

I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.

I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I'm a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I've lived my life backwards.

I think my formative experiences were really in junior high, where at a typical public school we were doing little genetic experiments, very classic experiments.

I used to read comics when I was a kid.