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
'Avatar: The Last Airbender' is, to my mind, the greatest American animated series ever produced. The characters lived and breathed.
'Avatar: The Last Airbender' creators Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have, along with their team, painstakingly planned out the Avatarverse.
In 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized 120 saints of China, 87 of whom were ethnically Chinese. My home church was incredibly excited because this was the first time the Roman Catholic Church acknowledged Chinese citizens in this way.
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.
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.
During the Cultural Revolution, the communists came in, and what they wanted to do was eradicate all sense of traditional Chinese culture.
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.
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.
This is a profession for me, but I started off as a self-publisher working on my own schedule and my own stuff before moving on to graphic novels with First Second Books, where there was definitely a schedule, but it was very different from monthly comics.
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.
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.
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.
The project that I did between 'Boxer & Saints' was 'The Shadow Hero,' which is illustrated by Sonny Liew, an artist who lives in Singapore.
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.