Gene Luen Yang Quotes
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Creativity requires input, and that's what research is. You're gathering material with which to build.
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The project that I did between 'Boxer & Saints' was 'The Shadow Hero,' which is illustrated by Sonny Liew, an artist who lives in Singapore.
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Superheroes were created in America, they're most popular in America, and at their best, they embody American ideals.
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I got these big coffee table books about Chinese opera from the local library, and I loved looking through them. I loved studying the intricate costumes and figuring out how to 'cartoonify' them.
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I think, pretty much like everyone around my age, I grew up playing those classic video games. I wouldn't say I was addicted to them, but I definitely liked them.
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Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.
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I love hearing people who are smarter than me talk about my comics. It makes me feel smarter.
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I wanted to make an explicitly educational comic that taught readers the concepts I covered in my introductory programming class. That's what 'Secret Coders' is. It's both a fun story about a group of tweens who discover a secret coding school, and an explanation of some foundational ideas in computer science.
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The most labor-intensive part of putting together a comic is the drawing.
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I grew up in a religious community, and like everyone, I went through a period of doubt and later made a conscious choice to embrace the faith of my childhood.
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For 'Boxers & Saints,' I started by reading a couple of articles on the Internet, then writing a really rough outline, then getting more hardcore into the research. I went to a university library once a week for a year, year and a half.
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'Boxers' was more time consuming simply because it was longer, but 'Saints' was definitely harder. I think it's just hard to talk about faith in general.
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With my own comics, I try hard to get the vision in my head onto paper, to have one match the other as closely as possible. With the 'Airbender' comics, I'm working with someone else's vision, an already-established vision. I want to stay true to what's come before.
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I was a huge fan of the Bruce Timm animated series and, of course, the live action 'Lois & Clark' series. I watched that when I was in college.
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I talk about religion because it's one of the ways human beings find power and belonging. Religion is more than just that - I think faith traditions give us ways to talk about experiences of the numinous, too - but power and belonging are a big part of it.
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We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it's okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It's okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you're human.
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I grew up on monthly comics. My closet is full of monthly comics. I've always wanted to do a monthly comic, and while I've had a couple of offers, the timing has never worked out. Most superhero comics come into the world as monthly series, so we wanted the same for 'The Shadow Hero.'
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The premise of 'Secret Coders' is reminiscent of 'Harry Potter.' An intrepid band of tweens stumbles upon a secret school, only instead of teaching magic, the school teaches coding.
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For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood.
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'The Green Turtle' was created in the 1940s by a cartoonist named Chu Hing, one of the first Asian Americans to work in the American comic book industry.
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When you work on a pre-existing character, when you end up getting invited to be part of a legacy character like Superman, I don't feel like it would be true to the character if all I did was go in looking to express my own voice.
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Ch'in Shih-huang is the first emperor of China. He united seven separate kingdoms into a single nation. He built the Great Wall and was buried with the terra-cotta soldiers. The Chinese have mixed feelings about him. They're proud of the nation he created, but he was a maniacal tyrant.
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I minored in creative writing in college, and I've played with the idea of doing something more hybrid, but comics are my first love.
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In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.