One of the ways [racism] pops up is when they turn a comic into a live-action movie and there's this temptation to make Asian characters white.
Gene Luen YangAt the very core of what a comic is, time and space are kind of the same thing. When your reader moves her eyes across the page, she should be moving through time in your story.
Gene Luen YangI think a lot of us go through a period where we feel like outsiders, and deal with that by wishing we were insiders. So that was the emotional core of American Born Chinese.
Gene Luen YangSuperheroes are also about immigrants. Superman, the prototype of all superheroes, is a prototypical immigrant. His homeland was in crisis, so his parents sent him to America in search of a better life. He has two names, one American, Clark Kent, and the other foreign, Kal-El. He wears two sets of clothes and lives in between two cultures. He loves his new country, but a part of him still longs for his old one.
Gene Luen YangAs somebody who's kind of a technophile, I'm interested in how traditional and digital publishing connect. Maybe ten years ago they were seen as antagonists, but now they complement each other. There's data that shows digital sales actually drive print sales. And even the ways in which pictures and words, text and image, interact - we're seeing these books that are very hard to categorize. All of that is very exciting to me.
Gene Luen Yang