Bechdel: I've never read much Dan Clowes. I feel more like R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar. That's the stuff that was formative for me. When I was in my twenties, that's what I was reading.

Bechdel: I would make repetitive graphic marks in my diary as a kid. I was afraid of lying, or writing untruths, so I would add these little notes that said, "I think," to qualify the sentences. It was a way of undoing myself. Eventually it got too time consuming to write those words over and over again, so I made them into a little symbol, and the symbol got bigger and bigger, and I would go over it and over it until whole entries in my journal were obscured.

In a way I feel like this memoir is just an elaborated version of that, these crazy, repetitive marks on paper.

Thompson: It's not much different from, in the Crumb documentary, what happened to Charles Crumb, where he starts filling up sketchbooks with little marks.