Umar Bin Hassan: For the ages now, Bill Adler has been trying to get me to write things, and I said, "Bill, please, I have no time; I'm so busy," but he just kept at me and at me and at me for the last 10 years. Maybe even longer than that, because we met about 20 years ago. He was a publicist for that first album when I first came back to the group in 1990, that Island Records put out,Be Bop or Be Dead, and so we became somewhat instant friends then, you know. We've always kept in touch, so he's always known about the aspects of my life

Then one day, like he shows on the comic book, I started telling him about some of my adventures as a shoe shine boy from the age of 15 and he said, we gotta write some of that. So for somehow, Shawn, I just said I'm going to relent, break down, and do some stories. So it was that story, about me beginning shoe shining. I got some other the stories about the competitive little shoe shine boy I ran up against. That's some really crazy stuff. And then there's that one about the Gypsy boy - I didn't even know there were Gypsies in Ohio at the time I ran to on the street, but he introduced me to the whole Gypsy culture. It was really amazing. There were some things in that I didn't understand and there were some things I was told that were lies. Other stories of mine are about surviving as a young man in Akron, Ohio, so boom

We hooked up with Nate, the cartoonist, through one of the most prominent writers of comics now, Ed Piskor. He liked it, but he said, I don't have much time, but I can hook you up with a young guy by the name of Nate McDonough. So the three of us began communicating almost every day on the Internet

When we got through, Bill tried to get around. Some people weren't ready for it, didn't want to do it. But then, boom. He said, listen, somebody at Rap Genius wants to put it up. Who was you, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity. I said, yeah, boom, put it up