When Liz Prince launched a Patreon campaign, she knew she wanted to give her supporters something special, frequently. As a cartoonist, the obvious answer was a daily strip. As the Patreon and its daily rewards continue into their third year, Prince has generated a tremendous volume of material and felt the work needed a more permanent presentation.

Look Back and Laugh is the result, a book collecting every one of Prince’s 2016 once-a-day strips. Published by Top Shelf/IDW and available in stores now, Look Back and Laugh chronicles a tumultuous year of travel, family emergencies and personal changes. Oh, and lots of cats, too.

RELATED: Liz Prince Reveals Her Life as a “Tomboy”

Prince recently took the time to discuss with CBR subjects like Look Back and Laugh's publication, the support of Patreon backers, the tradition (and demands) of the daily strip and the reality of autobiography.

This book started as a reward for your Patreon backers, correct? The daily strip is the classic model of comic strips. Were you cognizant of working in that tradition when you started?

Liz Prince: I’m extremely cognizant of that tradition! Journal comics are my favorite genre; it had always been a goal of mine to draw a year’s worth of diary comics, inspired by the many cartoonists who have worked and still work in that format (James Kochalka, Carrie McNinch, Ben Snakepit, etc.). The Patreon campaign started as a way to get myself out of a pretty massive writer’s block: Something happens every day, so I couldn’t claim to be uninspired, and having people who were contributing money to read the comics made me accountable to get the work done. And now two years later I’m still drawing these daily comics!

Did you give much thought to the mix of routine (daily routines) versus active (travel, unusual things happen) strips? There’s a strip for March 10 where you sum it up yourself: some days you can’t cram everything into three panels and other days it’s like a single ellipsis, marking time.

The thing that keeps you on your toes when drawing a daily comic is that you have to find a way to try to make even the most mundane of days something that will be worthwhile to the reader. The days when I’m doing something exciting or out of the ordinary almost feel less artistically interesting to me, because they usually end up being a laundry list of the things I saw or did, whereas those boring do-nothing days allow for more reflection on larger life issues.

When you started the year-long project, did you expect it to be such a momentous year? Family illness, home-buying, travel -- you had a lot going on.

I had absolutely none of those things on my radar (with the exception of my trip to Macedonia)! I do feel fortunate that there was outside momentum in my life at that point to hook the reader, but in some cases, that was just the cherry on top of the shit sundae.

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It was interesting that the strips point out that although they are largely autobiographical, they aren’t really you. You get a haircut, but don’t like drawing yourself that way and go back to the way you usually draw yourself. You point out that you have many tattoos, but rarely draw yourself with any. Do you think there is a clear distinction between cartoon Liz and real Liz or is the difference always shifting and unquantifiable?

I don’t know if I feel like cartoon Liz isn’t really me, but I do have to acknowledge that I have created a character that I want to always be recognizable, a la Charlie Brown, and that butts up against the narrative when the comic itself is about physical appearance. I think that, with any autobiographical narrative, the reader should be aware that the narrator is constantly filtering events through their own specific lens. It’s not a falsehood, but we make specific choices to further a narrative.

Being a cartoonist seems to involve lots of travel! You teach kids in Macedonia and attend creative workshops and conventions in different places. Is it a relief to have a trip, to give your strips something new to focus on for a short time?

The travel certainly breaks up the routine of me sitting at home with my cats waiting for something interesting to happen so I can write about it, but when too many things are happening at once it can be a struggle to choose which exciting thing to highlight. For example, you may have noticed, if frogs are involved, I will always choose to write about them: It’s not always such an easy choice for me!

After a lengthy travel in the spring, you get home (Apr 28 strip) and write that it’s hard to get back into the routine, that you “forgot how to write comics.” Were you still creating each daily strip during those travels? If so, did you carve out time every day or work through a batch every few days?

It is very hard while traveling to find time to draw the daily comics: What usually happens is that I’ll write them as quick thumbnails while I’m traveling, but will then have to draw a week or so’s worth once I’ve returned from my trip. I’m actually currently the furthest behind I’ve ever been (3 weeks!), due to a similar set of travels. My ideal situation would be one where every morning I wake up and draw my comic from the day before over a cup of coffee, but with the other comics work I do, and just the idiosyncratic nature of life in general, that has never really worked out to be the case.

Can you really look back and laugh when you see these strips again?

Not yet for some of them, but hopefully someday!

What else are you working on?

My collection of comics about punk music, Be Your Own Backing Band, is being reprinted this fall in full color (colored by the talented Hannah Fisher who also colored the Boom!Box series Coady and the Creepies that I created with artist Amanda Kirk). I’m still drawing these daily comics for my Patreon, and there are some other, longer-form comics that I’ve been working on, so hopefully those will see the light of day soon.