Well, 60 years ago, I was a little kid living back of my parents candy store in Brooklyn. I loved to read comics, Spider Man and Superman. My brother and I could read them, but we always had to put them back. I couldn't keep any of the comics, I couldn't play with any of the toys in the candy store. So there was a store from the '30's, a candy store before, and all of the stuff from that store was in these little closed shelves underneath. And they were all broken or used. And so I looked through the shelves to see what I can get that I could own. And I found a cache of paints. So I started painting on the floor on cardboard. My mother would say "Mottele..." - that's what she called me, Mottele. First, she thought I was crazy wasting my time. But besides that, she said, "Why do you paint six in a day? Take your time and paint one thing in two or three days and think about it." And so that's kept me through my life. One other anecdote about as I was growing, I read somewhere that real artists paint with canvas. But there was no canvas in the candy store. We lived across diagonally from the Prospect Place Market in Brooklyn in Brownsville. You could get pickles and you could get shoes and you could get kol ma'tamim but you couldn't get canvas. So we had a window shade in the back. And I took a scissors and cut the window shades up and started painting my first whole oil paint on this window shade. And I'm really surprised that my mother and father didn't kill me at the time, so I wouldn't be speaking to you right now. But that was the beginning of getting interested in art. Somebody recommended when I was in college about being an illustrator. So I got my portfolio together. At the time, I couldn't afford 8x10 color shots of my paintings. So I had black and white photographs. And one of the first jobs I had was doing Esquire Magazine for a short story. And so that kind of got me rolling. I started doing children's books, but I wasn't a writer, I was more of an illustrator for hire. I went to the Jewish Publication Society and they gave me the book, The Wise Shoemaker of Studena, which I illustrated, and that was very exciting. And then I went to UAHC press. I did many, many books for them. One of the books I did was The Tattooed Torah, which has a life of its own, was made into an animated movie with Ed Asner as the narrator So I've been involved in creating Jewish themed things because I'm very affected by my heritage and I want to have my children know and my grandchildren connect to being Jewish as well. Becoming a writer was like a different kind of thing for me. It was, in essence, pulling teeth to write something. My mother who was a Holocaust survivor, didn't tell me her story when I was growing up, she would say "Feh, who needs to know this." The whole neighborhood that I lived in when I grew up, they were all Holocaust survivors. But nobody ever wanted to speak about it. When my mother finally told me her story, and she had passed away a number of years, I decided that I would write her story as a graphic novel called Mendel's Daughter. And so finally, it was published. Simon & Schuster Free Press had translations into French and Spanish and Polish, and my mother who thought her story was nothing would probably be very surprised. And I think she'd also be very happy that her son who was an artist, "Oy vey," that brought her story to life. That was a very important thing for me. So that's kind of how I started with doing graphic novels.