Dave Roman counts himself lucky not to have had to fight the old battles familiar to previous generations of comics fans and creators. Far from pressuring him to trade in his favorite childhood reading for “real” books, Roman’s parents and teachers were great about feeding his interest. When he started to write and draw comics himself, they cheered him on. Roman met graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier at art school and proposed to her midflight on an airplane by presenting her with a handmade comic in which he popped the question on the next-to-last page. He had left the last page blank for her to write in her response. Telgemeier — the author of Smile, Drama, and Sisters — scribbled “Yes!” Although no longer married, Roman and Telgemeier came of age professionally together and in 2011 were even profiled by The New York Times as a rising comics-world power couple. Ten years earlier, media attention at that level would have been unimaginable for any graphic novelist whose name was not Art Spiegelman.

After college Roman answered Scooby-Doo fan mail as a DC Comics intern before joining the editorial staff at Nickelodeon Magazine. It was an exciting job that for ten years put him in contact with a worldwide array of comics artists and writers. Getting to know their work helped Roman sift through the many options open to him as he searched for his own creative voice and style.

These days Roman puts the stamp of his pert, oddball sense of humor on everything he does, whether he is working solo or collaboratively. The chance to team up with an artist friend seems for him to be the most enjoyable aspect of being a citizen in good standing of the world comics community. As Roman told me when we recorded this conversation in the living room of his Brooklyn apartment on December 13, 2013, he also gets great satisfaction from meeting young fans — and, if making comics is what they really dream of doing, urging them to have the courage to try.

Leonard S. Marcus: How did you discover comics?

Dave Roman: I began as a fan of newspaper comic strips — Peanuts, Garfield, Dennis the Menace — whatever was in our local newspaper. Then one day I bought a Garfield collection at a school book fair. The experience of seeing the daily strips brought together in that way and of following a story in sequence from page to page made me fall in love with comics. After that I wanted to read as many comic strips as possible. I sought out other newspapers, hoping to find strips that were not published in ours. I began to copy the strips too.

Q: Then what happened?

A: When I was in fifth or sixth grade, my dad took me to a comics shop. The owner introduced me to comics that he thought would appeal to me as a fan of the strips: Scrooge McDuck by Carl Barks and Groo the Wanderer, a fantasy series by Sergio Aragonés, who is best known for doing Mad magazine. By then I was also drawing my own comics.

I figured out quickly that a comic book wouldn’t be too hard to make at home: all it took was paper and staples. I would ask my parents to photocopy the comic books I drew at their office. At first I sold them to family members. Then in junior high I sold them at the school store. I was determined to become a comic book mogul! By high school my friends and I were going to comics conventions and taking a table at which we showed off our wares. Of course, we made no money whatsoever. We just needed to get our comics out there and into people’s hands.

Q: What were your comics like in those days?

A: I had a character named Rad Brad. He was rad! — and looked something like the characters in Calvin and Hobbes. I also had a cast of farm characters called The Funny Farm. They looked like Garfield characters. I would take a style and create new characters in it. In junior high I was doing a book called Samurai Jack, about a kid samurai warrior. That was inspired by Sergio Aragonés.

Q: Apparently, your father was fine with your interest in comics.

A: I was pretty fortunate in that regard. My immediate family and friends were supportive and my teachers even more so. In junior high the teachers encouraged me to draw a comic strip for the school paper.

Q: Did you have other artists in your family?

A: One of my uncles was known as “the artist of the family.” People would say that I was following in his footsteps. He wasn’t a professional artist, but he had painted when he was younger and he drew very well.

Another relative gave me a book called How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. This was the how-to book for superhero comics artists. It had sections on “dynamic anatomy,” “action poses,” “how to show people being thrown through a window” — all that kind of exciting stuff. I liked to read superhero comics, but I found that as an artist I was better at drawing humor comics and things with simpler character designs. I had a little bit of an identity crisis. For a long time, I felt I was doing a kind of dance between the two styles as I tried to figure myself out as an artist.

Q: Did Art Spiegelman’s Maus change the way you and your friends thought about comics?

A: The two books that are often mentioned as game-changers are Maus and The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Maus even more so because it was not a superhero book and because it was a comic about historical events. In my senior year of high school, I took a history test for which we had to choose from a selection of readings. Maus, a graphic novel, was one of the choices. That in itself was amazing to me. As a reader, I was blown away by Maus. But it didn’t seem like the kind of thing I would ever do. I kept gravitating toward whimsy and fantasy.

Q: What did you study at art school? What future did you imagine for yourself?

A: In my freshman year at the School of Visual Arts, everyone took foundation classes in painting, sculpture, and photography. My painting teacher was honest with me. He told me that my painting, which I was trying to do realistically, was weak at best, but that the drawings he found in my notebooks and sketchbooks — the things that I was doodling in the margins — had real life and spirit to them. His comment opened a door for me. It made me realize that I had to channel what I was doing when I was loose and not trying so hard. After that I switched my major from classical illustration to cartooning.

But this was in the mid-nineties, when the comics industry was in an economic downturn. The cartooning teachers at SVA were all saying not to count on the comics industry for a job. In the past the idea had been to get a job after graduation at Marvel or DC or Archie Comics, or to try to launch a newspaper comic strip of your own. The graphic novel explosion hadn’t happened yet, so I didn’t realize I could create long-form comics and get paid for it.

As it happened, immediately after college I was hired by Nickelodeon to be the assistant to their three comics editors. I stayed for ten years, and as time went on, I did more and more editing myself. I worked with artists from around the world. It was really exciting. By the time I left, I had also gained more confidence in my own drawing ability. I felt ready to be on my own.

Q: What did you do next?

A: My comics friends and I had all gotten used to the idea that we were not going to make any money from comics, that creating them was basically an exciting kind of hobby. Cartoonists were just starting to put their work on the Internet, which was a new way to self-publish your work that was completely free. The Internet became a new underground comix scene. The variety of what was out there was amazing. I decided to try it too. I met a great many people that way, including editors who wanted to publish me. The Internet turned out to be a great way to become known.

Q: How did the current explosion of interest in graphic novels get started?

A: Part of it had to do with the impact of the Internet, which allowed people from all over the world to connect through their comics. Historically, the comics industry had been male dominated and largely obsessed with superheroes. It seemed like it was either that or nothing. Most of the books being published were targeted to a male audience. But when Japanese comics, some of which were aimed at girls, started being imported to the U.S., people saw that comics could speak to many different audiences. That helped to open things up, and more women started making comics. So many new voices have come into comics. Then the children’s book publishers suddenly became interested in comics too. So there were many factors that all came together. For a long time, people associated comics just with superheroes. It seems like it was either that or nothing. But now comics are no longer just a genre, but a format within which you can tell any kind of story.

Q: What kinds of stories do you like to tell?

A: I grew up with the Muppets and Sesame Street. They provided me with the ladder to Mel Brooks and movies like Airplane! As a kid, I loved seeing familiar things skewered. I loved satire.

The Teen Boat and Astronaut Academy books are me taking things I love, or genres that I love, and putting a fun spin on them. Astronaut Academy was published first, but both series were created at about the same time. Both started as mini-comics and web comics. The Teen Boat stories were originally done as black-and-white books that we photocopied in hundreds of copies. They found their way into stores and people’s hands.

Q: You collaborated on Teen Boat with your friend, comics and video game writer-artist John Green. What was that like?

A: John and I met when I was in high school. We are best friends and have known each other for years and years. We have a sort of shorthand way of communicating when we’re working together. John is a little more structured and classical than I am. He’ll come up with perfectly formed one-liners and puns, whereas I will think of some really bizarre visual or weird disconnect that to me is very funny. I will say, “Let’s have a boy who can transform into a boat,” and John will know exactly what type of yacht the boat should be. I sometimes feel like I’m pitching the ball for John to hit out of the park. It takes the humor to another level when you appear to be taking it all so seriously, down to the last detail.

John and I are both primarily kids of the eighties, when transformation fantasies were a huge part of children’s entertainment. There were GoBots toys and Transformers and the TV cartoon show about the robot Voltron. There were even teddy bears called Popples that transformed into brightly colored balls. Teen Boat put a spin on all those things, while it was also a good way to talk about adolescence, when you’re growing up and your voice is changing and you are having pimples all at the same time. We liked contrasting the cool and not-so-cool aspects of growing up. It’s cool to be able to transform into a vehicle. But it’s not a really sexy vehicle. It’s a fairly small boat.

Q: The title is a pun on “dreamboat.”

A: Boats lend themselves to all sorts of nautical humor, not to mention puns like “pier pressure.” As a matter of fact, Teen Boat might have just been a joke between friends. A year passed between the long bus ride to a comics convention during which John and I came up with the idea for Teen Boat and the time when we finally said, “You know what? We should actually do that. Let’s make it into a little book.” We started by making an eight-page photocopied mini-comic. That could have been it too. But the reception was so positive that we thought, “We have to keep going.”

Q: You are married to comics artist Raina Telgemeier. Do you and Raina collaborate? Edit each other’s work?

A: We help each other when we’re stuck. But our books are so different that for the most part we keep things separate. I gravitate toward whimsy, whereas she is so grounded, always pulling from her own life. Because of that, we provide a great checks-and-balances system for each other. I get to be a really big fan of her work and to be the first reader of anything she does, and she is my first reader.

Q: In Astronaut Academy: Re-Entry, one of your characters discovers the dictionary and daydreams about spending the rest of his life immersed in a universe of words. Was that a moment taken from your own childhood?

A: A little bit. One of the things that that series is all about is the joy of playing with language. I loved Monty Python as a kid. As a teenager, I was already paying close attention to the way that certain comedians would turn a phrase or play with the English language. For Astronaut Academy, I had the idea of writing a comic in which the sentence structure was intentionally off-kilter, almost like a bad translation, and of generating new jokes from the misuse of certain words or expressions.

Q: Do you carry a sketchbook around with you?

A: Yes. I find that a lot of my ideas come from doodling characters over and over. After a while they take on a distinctive shape and personality, and I can start to think about them as people. Once that happens, stories form based on the relationship between the people. Most of my books have started that way.

Q: Do you revise your work much?

A: Not so much when I’m drawing, because for me the first drawings are usually the ones with the most energy. I want my finishes to feel like sketches, and I find the more I refine a drawing, the more is lost.

Q: Do you have a work routine?

A: I wish I did!

Q: Is there anything that you cannot draw?

A: Lots of things! Animals, cars, architecture, perspective. All the basics! Drawing is a little bit of a struggle for me, and I think it will always feel that way to me. Most people don’t realize this, but anytime you write a story, you are potentially introducing thousands of subjects that you have never drawn before.

Q: Tell me about the comic you did for this book, “The Proximity Effect.”

A: It’s about my relationship to New York City as someone who grew up just outside of the city, on Long Island. New York was always a presence, even though we couldn’t see the city from our window. I always knew it was out there and that we were in the shadow of it. I always felt that that’s where movies take place. That’s where the action is. Where I grew up felt more like what you’d see on TV sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver. What I found strange, and decided to focus on, was that my parents, who had grown up in Brooklyn, had wanted to move out from the city and that I was drawn toward the city — in the opposite direction. So I tried to show the city as a magical place and a place of bright colors and stars. That’s why I have myself flying through the city.

Q: Do you think that comics and film have a lot in common as art forms?

A: People have made that connection, because they’re both visual mediums and because a comic looks like a storyboard for a film, even though the two are created for very different purposes. But comics are also related to the traditional prose narrative. They require you to use your imagination to a degree that I think is closer to what it takes to read a novel than to what happens when you watch a film. With comics, even though you are given lots of pictures, you still have to connect what happens in between the frames for yourself. If an author chooses to show a person in a house, and then if in the next scene that person is shown outside the house, your imagination is what connects those moments. In film the frames flow continuously and you see every moment and every detail. You’re a more passive viewer. Comics fall somewhere between film and prose narrative.

Q: What is next for comics?

A: A lot of comics people are used to being underdogs and having to struggle. We’re used to fighting the system, to justifying our existence! But now librarians tell us stories about how one of our books inspired someone or helped a struggling reader. It’s not something we’re used to! We’re also meeting so many kids who want to make comics, including kids who have been inspired by us. We are really excited about the next generation. What are they going to produce?

This summer I tried to write a traditional novel. As a cartoonist, you tell yourself, “Those guys have it easy. They don’t have to draw anything!” But I found out that writing a novel is equally hard, in a different way. I would be writing a scene and struggling to find just the right turn of phrase. That is when I would catch myself thinking, “Can’t I just draw this?”