Nadja Spiegelman, who wrote Zig and Wikki’s story, recently graduated from Yale University as an English major. She grew up in New York City where there are few dragonflies and frogs, although there are certainly plenty of houseflies. When she was younger, she loved going to the country, where she collected insects and salamanders and kept them inside her shoe-box “bug museum.”

Trade Loeffler, who drew Zig and Wikki, grew up in Livermore, California. Unlike Zig and Wikki, he doesn’t believe flies make good pets. But he did like to collect them when he was a kid—to feed them to the funnel spiders that lived in a field near his house. Trade now lives in New York City with his wife, Annalisa; son, Clark; and dog, Boo. He is the creator of the all-ages web comic Zip and Li’l Bit but Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework was Trade’s first-ever work in print.