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.
— Gene Luen Yang
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.
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.
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 think there is always romantic tension between Lois Lane and Clark Kent.
'Avatar: The Last Airbender' creators Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have, along with their team, painstakingly planned out the Avatarverse.
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.
My brain subconsciously limits itself to panel compositions that my hand can actually draw.
The most labor-intensive part of putting together a comic is the drawing.
'The Green Turtle' wasn't all that popular. He lasted only five issues of Blazing Comics before disappearing into obscurity.
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.
Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.
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?
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.
There's bleeding between age groups in terms of reading material, and there's bleeding between media. So there are books that are clearly comics and books that are prose, and then there are these books that are kind of in-between.
I noticed that when my daughter was born, my son really, really liked her. But then as she started getting older, and as she started crawling around our house and touching different things that were his, sibling rivalry issues started appearing.
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.
Creativity requires input, and that's what research is. You're gathering material with which to build.
Superman was created in the late 1930s, and humankind's idea of what the future would be was very different.
Figuring out a way to balance the Boxer story with the Chinese Christians was difficult.
Many Japanese families moved to Taiwan during the occupation. Then, when the war ended, they were forced to move back. And at the macro level, the Taiwanese had every reason to cheer when the Japanese left. The Japanese military could often be incredibly brutal. The Taiwanese lived as second-class citizens on their own land.
'Avatar: The Last Airbender' is, to my mind, the greatest American animated series ever produced. The characters lived and breathed.
Nobody really knows for sure how the Boxer Rebellion started. It began among the poor, and the history of the poor is rarely written down.
Dichotomies are an inherent part of comics, aren't they? Comics are both pictures and words. They blend time and space. Many feature characters with dual identities like Bruce Wayne/Batman. Cartoonists also tend to live dichotomous lives because many of us have day jobs.
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.'
'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.
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.
At any comic book convention in America, you'll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.
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.
Superman is such an old character. He's an old character with this huge legacy behind him. And one of the awesome things about the fact that he's been around for these decades is that he's gone through these different phases.
Eventually, I just couldn't imagine myself being in a cubicle for my entire career.
I would hope that maybe math teachers could use 'Prime Baby' as a way of establishing an emotional connection between students and numbers.
Every superhero has this superhero identity and a civilian identity. A lot of their lives are about code switching.
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.
I never worked a job that required research. I'm not really good at it, to be honest.
The rumor is Chu Hing really wanted the 'Green Turtle' to be Chinese American, but the publisher didn't think that would sell. If you read those books, the hero almost always has his back facing the camera so you can't see his face. When he turns around, his face is obscured.
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.
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.
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.
The Boxer Rebellion is a war that was fought on Chinese soil in the year 1900. The Europeans, the Japanese and their Chinese Christian allies were on one side. On the other were poor, starving, illiterate Chinese teenagers whom the Europeans referred to as the Boxers.
Carl Barks and Don Rosa are two of my favorite cartoonists ever.
I have a fairly limited drawing style. I'm not like my friend Derek Kirk Kim, who can pretty much change his style at will. My drawing style can handle some of my stories, but not all of them.
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.
There's something about the intimacy of comics that gives you a false bravado; you don't always consider the consequences.
When I first started making comics, I was living with a bunch of guys, old college friends. We had this deal. At the end of each day, they would ask me how far I'd gotten on my comic. And if I hadn't made my goals, they were supposed to make me feel really bad about myself. They happily obliged.
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.
I took a Logo programming class in fifth grade. Logo is a language specifically designed for the classroom environment. It was basically doodling through words.
I was really worried that sitting at home by myself in front of a computer was going to make me crazy.
In academia in general, there's this push toward using comics as an educational tool.
