A little bit of inside dirt on Forever 16, for those who were curious about what goes into the making of this strip.

- Forever 16 began in 2006 as an attempt to reboot my old Jesse and Elyse comics from high school. Originally, I was just going to use myself and the people I knew as characters again, but I decided it'd be more interesting to create my own characters who I could have more creative freedom with.

- I originally intended the tone of the strip to be a cross between "FoxTrot" and "Bloom County" - an ordinary American family to whom outrageously ridiculous things keep happening, most of it drawn from current events. As I kept toying around with the characters, though, the universe they live in became less cartoony and much more down-to-earth, to the point where I now take every effort to make it look like the real world. I feel it adds to the characters' believability when the reader can feel like they really exist out there somewhere.

- The Maxwell family is loosely based on my own family. Joel and Katy are two years apart, just like me and my sister. Katy is a caricature of what my sister was like at age 14, hopping on whatever was trendy at the time and fawning over her favorite celebrities. Tina is an exaggeration of the way my mother kept a sharp eye on what my sister and I could watch on TV when we were kids. William is a sleepy-eyed deadpan snarker, much like my own dad.

- Aaron began as a caricature of a fellow named Josh who I shared a dorm room with at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He was really into frisbee and skateboarding, which Aaron was also into when I first began sketching the strip. As he evolved and became more of his own character, the resemblance to Josh gradually disappeared.

- The only reason I introduced Steve to the strip was because Westworld needed a drummer. When I drew him looking kind of sleepy and disinterested, I knew exactly what I wanted his personality to be.

- Jocelyn's character design was inspired by a girl I saw at the mall one day. I didn't speak to her, but her platinum blond hair, facial piercings, thigh-high boots, and fishnet stockings all seemed to suggest a great new character.

- Most of the main characters have some aspect of my own personality in them. Joel has my observational sense of humor, Steve has my encyclopedic knowledge of geek culture, Jocelyn has my general distrust of high-ranking authority figures, Kendra has my passion for art, and so on.

- Other characters are based on people I knew in high school. Ashleigh is basically all my sister's childhood friends rolled into one, Vince is a caricature of a very thuggish guy who sat next to me in Economics, and Lindsay is very heavily inspired by several girls I knew who were just nasty to me all the time for no apparent reason.

- Some characters are "aspirations"; others are "realizations". Joel, for instance, is basically the type of kid I wish I could have been in high school (quick-witted, social, guitar player in a garage band), and Michelle is essentially the embodiment of the type of girl I find attractive (smart, kindly, creative, ambitious, and cute as hell). Abby, on the other hand, is much closer to how I actually was in high school (shy, awkward, bullied, and plagued by anxiety), and Aaron's frequent misfortunes with the opposite sex are an illustration of what I always figured would happen if I ever tried to talk to a girl.

- The use of popular culture as a source of humor and story situations stems from one of my guilty pleasures - VH1's long-forgotten "I Love the (decade)" shows. Specifically, "I Love the '90s" and "I Love the '90s Part Deux". Watching those made me realize how much ridiculous stuff happened in the decade I grew up in that I never paid attention to when it was going on. I wanted a chance to lampoon the events of the 1990s, and setting the strip there seemed like the perfect opportunity to do it. Likewise, when VH1 did "I Love the New Millennium", I decided to extend the strip to the 2000s as well. The 2000s, of course, were more frustrating than ridiculous, so a lot of the stories I write for that decade tend to be more cynical.

- I recently made the decision to cut off the strip at the end of 2009, giving it a good solid 20 year run. For a while, I was outlining stories that lampooned the current events from 2010 to 2012, but it was getting harder and harder to come up with fresh ideas, and I decided I can't keep outlining more and more stuff that I'll probably never write or draw - I've got to end it somewhere. That means that the strips I posted daily in my gallery between October 2010 and April 2011 aren't considered canon anymore. But folks can still enjoy 'em if they want.