I general don’t color my stuff – I’m pretty horrible with color. Usually, I’ll get one of my cartoonist friends to help me out. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
Religion and culture are two important ways in which we as humans find our identity. That’s certainly true for me. – Gene Luen Yang
If I’m writing about a modern-day suburb, there’s going to be details of the home and furniture, and if I’m writing about a historical period, those details, those pieces of the world are going to be there as well, but they’ll be simplified, because I’m cartooning it. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
Superheroes were created in America, they’re most popular in America, and at their best, they embody American ideals. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
My first job was as a programmer. So I feel like I’m familiar with the information technology sector and the information technology culture. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
I finished ‘American Born Chinese’ in 2005, so after that, I started actively researching the Boxer Rebellion. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
I would hope that maybe math teachers could use ‘Prime Baby’ as a way of establishing an emotional connection between students and numbers. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
‘The Green Turtle’ wasn’t all that popular. He lasted only five issues of Blazing Comics before disappearing into obscurity. – Gene Luen Yang
Creativity requires input, and that’s what research is. You’re gathering material with which to build. – Gene Luen Yang
Comics are such a powerful educational tool. Simply put, there are certain kinds of information that are best communicated through sequential visuals. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
I’m a cartoonist. I write and draw comic books and graphic novels. I’m also a coder. – Gene Luen Yang
In my research, I learned that the Boxers’ kung fu wasn’t all that formalized. The vast majority of them didn’t belong to some age-old martial arts tradition. They were basically poor, starving teenagers doing the best they could to figure out how to fight, relying more on their mystical beliefs than formal training. – Gene Luen Yang
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. – Gene Luen Yang
