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I just have to draw.

If my hands got cut off -- God willing they will not -- I would draw with my mouth or my feet.

My name is Nicole Georges.

I am a cartoonist and an illustrator in Portland, and I also teach people how to make comics.

When I moved to Portland, I was 19 years old.

I moved here from Kansas, and I was so excited by everything that was going on here, I was excited by the zine scene and bicycles and vegan food and everything, that I was keeping a diary, just frantically drawing everything that happened all the time.

And that turned into my diary comic, Invincible Summer.

I started teaching zine workshops to homeless youth and senior citizens.

I still do artist residencies teaching middle schoolers and elementary school students how to tell stories through pictures.

When I'm working on a page, sometimes I get to a point where I want to make sure the thing I'm drawing is anatomically accurate.

And in order to do that, I will take pictures of myself doing the poses that are depicted in my pencil sketches.

All right.

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I like any kind of advice; I just love it.

In my zine Invincible Summer one day I did a fake advice column called "Ask Nicole, America's Smartest Girl."

And one of the questions was "Dear Nicole, how do I get creepy men on the bus to talk to me?"

And my answer was get visible tattoos, because nobody can resist a visible tattoo as a conversation starter.

Like, if you ever wanted to see the prison tattoo that's under the shirt of the man on the bus, just, you know, have something yourself, and he will gladly take off his shirt to show you and try to make a bridge there.

When I was 22, I went to a palm reader, and she said, "You should talk to your dad more often."

And I said, "I can't talk to my dad more often because he is dead, but thank you anyway."

And she said, "Oh, let me stop you there.

Maybe the man you think is your father is dead, but your real father is very much alive."

When the psychic said that, I asked my sister if it was true, and my sister broke down crying and said, "It's true, it's true!

I'm so sorry!"

I didn't know what to do, so I called Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who's a conservative right-wing radio host, and I got on the air and I was so excited.

And even though she's right-wing and conservative and she hates feminism, and gay people she only kind of tolerates, I still was thrilled to be on the phone with her.

So that's what my book Calling Dr. Laura is about.

When I was finding out if the secret was true by asking my sister, getting up the guts, and then deciding what to do about my mom, I did get up the courage to come out to her about knowing and I also came out to her as gay at the same time, just to get it all out of the way, just like a clearinghouse double whammy.

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When I was a kid, I had a lot of animals as friends.

Animals were very tolerant of my bad behaviors.

Like I was just a sarcastic, really kind of caustic, mean little kid, and animals were not easy to offend.

And they were steadfast and they were somebody I could talk to and be myself around.

They didn't ask a lot of questions, they didn't bug me.

My mission statement in life is to help animals through my art, somehow.

I try to reflect the emotional lives of animals.

However that hits people and whatever they decide to do with that is their own business, but I would like for people to care about them a little bit.

I also feel that about gay people.

I feel like people reading my book, they're reading a story about a gay person and they're having some kind of connection with me as a character, and when it's time for them to vote on something that impacts me or make a decision that impacts a gay person, they think like, even if they don't have a lot of gay people in their life, maybe they feel like they have me in their life.

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I adopted a dog when I was 16, and it was kind of like having a baby in high school, because I was saddled with the responsibility of that dog for the rest of her life.

Her name was Baija.

Fetch is a story about me getting Baija, our time together, her barking at people, me writing a manifesto for her which I pasted up around Portland, and her helping me through really, really hard times, terrible times.

I would say it's almost like a queer feminist Portland Marley & Me, if I had to take it there.

This is Ponyo.

I got Ponyo at the Humane Society a couple of years ago.

I was reeling with grief after my dog Baija died, and I was just trolling the Humane Society.

I held her on her back for a minute.

She did this little smile, this, like, relaxed smile.

She was just so happy to be in my arms, and that was it.

I was out of town a lot this year doing book tour stuff.

And then I came home, and she was bli-ind.

She was 90% blind.

She was running into things.

She would go to jump on my lap and have perfect form but, like, be jumping a foot away from where I was.

So I had to take her to a specialist.

I'm not a millionaire, so I thought I could have a fundraiser for this.

A lot of people like Ponyo.

I made special art, like limited-edition artist tote bags with Ponyo on them.

And within a week, we were funded.

We got the surgery, it went great, and now she can see.

[ barks ] Well, sometimes people say to me, "How did you get a book?

How did you get your agent?"

And I don't mean to sound like a grouch, but what I would like to say to them is all you have to do is pay out of pocket to publish your own work for upwards of 10 years, go on several tours where you make little to no money, have a bad childhood that you have honed the writing skills to be able to express, and then maybe someday a publisher will want to give you some money and take a chance on you to make a book that could then come out.

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The process to me is to find something you like and just keep working at it, and that's it.

And don't put the pressure on it to be your job.

Do it because you love it, because that's the thing other people are going to love.

People want to see your true personality and your self, and I think it takes practice to learn how to be vulnerable in public.

I don't try to do what I think other people want me to do.

I don't think that that would work.