Top 45 Gene Luen Yang Quotes

Immigrant parents dream that their children will find a place in their new home, and they willingly suffer hardships in service to that dream. That was certainly true of my parents.

‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ creators Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have, along with their team, painstakingly planned out the Avatarverse.

It’s just nerve-wracking in general to write ‘Superman,’ right? I’m a life-long superhero fan, and he is the character that kicked off the entire genre.

Carl Barks and Don Rosa are two of my favorite cartoonists ever.

When I was growing up, I did go to the arcade. We had a neighborhood arcade, and my friends and I would go fairly regularly.

I would hope that maybe math teachers could use ‘Prime Baby’ as a way of establishing an emotional connection between students and numbers.

I work at a high school, and we have an anime and manga club.

I finished ‘American Born Chinese’ in 2005, so after that, I started actively researching the Boxer Rebellion.

A lot of Asians and Asian-Americans have liver problems. If you basically ask anybody who is Asian, they or one of their relatives will have some sort of a liver issue, and the liver actually falls into the jurisdiction of the gastroenterologist.

During the Cultural Revolution, the communists came in, and what they wanted to do was eradicate all sense of traditional Chinese culture.

I think a lot of the things in my life that I become most passionate about, and most excited about, are all from comics.

As I was researching, I was struck by how similar the Boxers were to Joan of Arc. Joan was basically a French Boxer. She was a poor teenager who wanted to do something about the foreign aggressors invading her homeland.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

I think every time you work with another collaborator, there’s an adjustment process where you figure out the other person’s strengths, and that has definitely happened for me.

The project that I did between ‘Boxer & Saints’ was ‘The Shadow Hero,’ which is illustrated by Sonny Liew, an artist who lives in Singapore.

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.

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.

Comics are such a powerful educational tool. Simply put, there are certain kinds of information that are best communicated through sequential visuals.

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.

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.

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.

I think the ‘Boxers’ book was easier for me to envision as a comic, because they were on this epic journey. These teenagers basically gathered into this army and marched to the capital city where they had a showdown with the Europeans and Japanese. On the ‘Saints’ side, it was a lot trickier.

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.

I was a superhero fan in the ’90s, so I’m definitely familiar with John Romita, Jr. In fact, when I was in high school, I would go to local conventions and line up and get his signature.

Both my mother and my father grew up in Asia, in a time of political instability. They’d earned college degrees before setting foot in the States but had to work menial jobs early on in order to make ends meet.

Superheroes were created in America, they’re most popular in America, and at their best, they embody American ideals.

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.

My first job was as a programmer. So I feel like I’m familiar with the information technology sector and the information technology culture.

Going from idea to production is a huge hurdle. It took me a while to overcome it. It’s basically all about self discipline, right?

Like all of us, I don’t think Facebook is 100% evil, but there are aspects of it that move towards evilness. It’s true of all the major Silicon Valley companies, that there are aspects to all of them that move towards evilness, but I don’t believe they’re 100% evil.

I majored in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley and worked as a software developer for a couple of years. Then I taught high school computer science for over a decade and a half in Oakland, California.

I started ‘American Born Chinese’ as a mini-comic. I would write and draw a chapter, photocopy a hundred or so copies at the corner photocopy store, and then try to sell them on consignment through local comics shops. If I could sell maybe half a dozen, I’d be doing okay.

In my classroom, I would start my lessons with a quick review of an old topic. Then, I would introduce a new topic. Finally, I would give my students a problem to solve on their own, one that would reinforce what I’d just taught.

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.

I’m a cartoonist. I write and draw comic books and graphic novels. I’m also a coder.

I love the interplay between words and pictures. I love the fact that in comics, your pictures are acting like words, presenting themselves to be read.

In academia in general, there’s this push toward using comics as an educational tool.

It’s a big deal to reveal your friend’s deepest truth, your friend’s deepest secret. And for all of us, when we do these big things, there’s a complexity of motivation that comes behind that decision.

I grew up with an Apple 2E – I had a deep, emotional attachment to that machine – and I loved doodling.

I kind of just write what I like to write. I’m thankful that readers of different ages seem to connect to my stories. I don’t consciously think about age demographics when I’m working on my comics.

‘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.