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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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 work at a high school, and we have an anime and manga club.
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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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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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To be able to write 'Superman,' to be able to work with the legendary artist who is John Romita Jr., I signed on as soon as I could.
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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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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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'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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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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Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.
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When I work on my own stuff - and I think this is true for anybody - but when you work on something that you just completely own, you are trying to stay as true to your own storytelling voice as you can.
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My experience of Chinese culture is indirect, through echoes. When I approach the cashier at my local Chinese supermarket, they switch to English before I've even said a word. They somehow know that I'm not quite Chinese enough.
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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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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 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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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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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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In the early '90s, I was finishing up my adolescence. I visited my local comic-book store on a weekly basis, and one week I found a book on the stands called 'Xombi,' published by Milestone Media.
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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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During the Cultural Revolution, the communists came in, and what they wanted to do was eradicate all sense of traditional Chinese culture.
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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.