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That said, I started going to going to comedy shows and stuff in New York when I was there, and that makes a big difference, seeing people. I started to do comic shows when I was there, reading comics. I control the projector and you do it panel by panel so that the audience never gets ahead. You do voices and the right pauses and timing. So to have people actually in front of you is really amazing.

Maybe as storyboard artist or something like that. But you have to go to school to be an animator. Your story is kind of inspirational for the humanities students of the world.

You also had a lot of experience working in museums—how did that influence your comics? The big person in Victoria at that museum was the first Justice of the Peace of British Columbia, Judge Begbie, who we knew everything about—and if you mention his name anywhere else, no one knows anything. Obscure is a relative term. Because people take the history really personally. I did a comic about Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale.

I started reading about her life—things just never seemed to go her way. She was a cool lady, she was super flamboyant, and I thought that I could find an angle, but I never did.

I hesitated about the Andrew Jackson one. Even stuff like Napoleon—I make all these Napoleon jokes. And I make him kind of cute and little, but Napoleon was a monster. He was fairly tall. There was a French system of height that was different from English. And then later on I had different opinions about it. I was looking up Robespierre, and Danton was the figure that really struck me as the more fascinating one. Sometimes you really want to make a comic about a person, and nothing comes together.

In order to make a comic about something, you really need to know it inside and out, especially something historical, which can be complex—different sides to the story, different opinions. Is part of your aim to enlighten your readers about lesser-known facts and people?

In the sixties and seventies, schools started to revise the way history was taught, working from the bottom up, like having students read E. So the study of history becomes less about the quirks of a certain king or president and more about the union strikes and the smaller people who made up those kinds of events.

Those books take themselves so seriously, and they should, but unfortunately, that just makes them amazing targets for comedy. I have a lot of affection for the things I poke fun at. Jane Eyre ran away from Mr. Rochester, but then she came back. She saw his face in the clouds and thought, I gotta go back! Her characters reacted differently to their surroundings. I once bought a Nancy Drew novel because she was wearing a gorgeous red gown on the cover, but I never even cracked the book.

I love the idea of extrapolating from the cover and creating a story based on it. You can go crazy with it. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, definitely. But the activities in the later centuries are just fascinating. And the clothes.