So I’m not a smoker, and I never have been. But back in high school I had friends who did, and sometimes I’d tag along with them when they’d go to the area beside the school where all the smokers hung out. I never thought about it that much at the time, but it is really interesting, the sort of unlikely friendships that arose from that shared habit, and how they defied the typical high school social caste system.

I don’t know why it all suddenly came back to me years later, and why I felt compelled to make comics about it though. I took a lot of strange detours with the comic, and as crazy as this sounds, sometimes it felt like the characters were steering me in those directions.