Gene Luen Yang
Gene Luen Yang
Gene Luen Yang is an American writer of graphic novels and comics. Until recently, he was the Director of Information Services and taught computer science at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, California and travels all over the world, speaking about graphic novels and comics at comic book conventions and universities, schools, and libraries. In 2012, Yang joined the faculty at Hamline University, as a part of the Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adultsprogram...
NationalityChinese
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth9 August 1973
CountryChina
I think reading has got so many more enemies now that graphic novels have kind of flipped over to that side.
It's easy to become anything you wish . . . so long as you're willing to forfeit your soul.
Wait." "So what am I supposed to do now?" "You know, Jin, I would have saved myself from five hundred years' imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey." (222-223)
Sometimes, a fight you cannot win is still worth fighting.
Building a habit of reading leads to all sorts of reading.
In the '40s and '50s, a lot of teachers and librarians saw the graphic novel as the enemy of reading.
One of the ways [racism] pops up is when they turn a comic into a live-action movie and there's this temptation to make Asian characters white.
When you work with somebody else, you automatically get a mixed voice. You hope it will benefit the story. But you don't know what the result will be.
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.
Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.
Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.
When 'American Born Chinese' started getting a lot of attention, I freaked out a little bit because I realized that up until then I had just been doing comics by following my gut. I didn't really know much about plot structure or anything; I kind of just followed my gut.
For 'Boxers and Saints', the tension between Eastern and Western ways of thinking was very personal for me, and I needed to control every aspect.
I've tried to write from my own understanding of identity in all my comics, whether it's about superheroes or historical conflicts or monkey gods.