Gene Luen Yang

“I love hearing people who are smarter than me talk about my comics. It makes me feel smarter.”

“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.”

“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 I got the job with 'Superman,' it felt like somebody threw me into the ocean. I was just trying to figure it out, to figure out how to tread water. Lucky for me, I'm part of a great team.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was a huge fan of the Bruce Timm animated series and, of course, the live action 'Lois & Clark' series. I watched that when I was in college.”

“Superman was created in the late 1930s, and humankind's idea of what the future would be was very different.”

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

“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.”

“I think there is always romantic tension between Lois Lane and Clark Kent.”

“'Avatar: The Last Airbender' is, to my mind, the greatest American animated series ever produced. The characters lived and breathed.”

“The thing about research is that there's no end. You constantly have this fear that an expert who knows more than you will call you out on some detail in your book.”

“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.”

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

“Family is in essence a small nation, and the nation a large family. In treating his own family with dignity, a ruler learns to govern his nation with dignity”

“Eventually, I just couldn't imagine myself being in a cubicle for my entire career.”

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