A biography for Gene Luen Yanghasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“We're afraid of writing characters different from ourselves because we're afraid of getting it wrong. We're afraid of what the Internet might say.”
“Dwayne McDuffie was one of my favorite writers. When I was growing up, he was one of the few African Americans working in American comics.”
“I would hope that maybe math teachers could use 'Prime Baby' as a way of establishing an emotional connection between students and numbers.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“The project that I did between 'Boxer & Saints' was 'The Shadow Hero,' which is illustrated by Sonny Liew, an artist who lives in Singapore.”
“When I looked into the lives of the Chinese saints, I discovered that many of them had died during the Boxer Rebellion, a war that occurred on Chinese soil in the year 1900.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“'Shadow Hero' was my first superhero story. I don't know why it took so long.”
“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.”
“My first job was as a programmer. So I feel like I'm familiar with the information technology sector and the information technology culture.”
“Religion and culture are two important ways in which we as humans find our identity. That's certainly true for me.”
“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.”
“Every superhero has this superhero identity and a civilian identity. A lot of their lives are about code switching.”