I want them to feel that forces of nature or society are sweeping them up in things. And I found that ants are a pretty perfect way to wring jokes out of that.

I thought of each strip as self-contained, trying to get some sort of resolution at the end of every page. I originally planned for publishing the pages in alternative weeklies, modelling the work after Sunday funnies. But then all of it fell through—papers don’t want to serialize comics anymore. So I split the pages up in two, horizontally, and published them online.

Slowly, a longer narrative formed out of it. When the stories with the main characters—the couple, the son, and the dad—reached a natural end, I ended up with a hundred-and-twenty-page graphic novel.