Female Speaker: Gene Yang was born in Alameda, California and beginning
about the age of two fell in love with drawing.
By the fifth grade he was deeply in love with comics
and if the stories are true, he and a friend of his
in fifth grade created a comic book and sold them to students
for the Statue of Liberty Fund.
And the story continues that his teachers were so proud of them,
that they gave them McDonalds coupons.
[laughter] And what a wonderful gift that was,
because that must have encouraged Gene
to continue that passion for comics.
And it was that love for comics and his own experience
as a Chinese-American boy trying to find his place in the world
and his own identity that produced,
or helped him produce the graphic novel American Born Chinese.
Many of you have probably read that wonderful piece of work
and you may also know that it was a finalist for the National Book Award
[applause] That story of a young boy trying to find his way to assimilate
into a predominately white high school also made history.
It was the first graphic novel to be nominated
for the National Book Award.
[applause] And it also won the Michael Prince Award
for Young Adult Literature this year.
[applause] You will also be excited to hear
that Mr. Yang's next book is a collection of short stories
and that's due out in 2009.
Now in addition to his creative work,
he is also a high school teacher,
which deserves a round of applause in itself.
[applause] I was thinking how fortunate his students must be
to have such a creative and conscious spirit in the classroom.
Yang currently lives in San Francisco,
in the San Francisco Bay Area, with his wife and son and new daughter
and they are here with him today.
Let's be very grateful that he's here with us today.
Mr. Yang. [applause] Gene Yang: Thank you very much for coming.
I'm very excited to be here.
When I first started American Born Chinese about seven years ago now,
I was publishing them as mini comics,
which means you finish drawing an issue and you take it Kinkos
and you make about a hundred copies -- [laughter] --
and then you take it over to your local comic convention
and you sell them.
And if you sell about a dozen, usually to personal friends
and your mom, then you are doing really well.
So talking to a crowd of this size is really a treat.
Unfortunately I can't do a reading for you today because reading
out of a comic without some kind of an LCD projector just doesn't work.
So instead what I'd like to do is I'd like to talk
about how I got into comics.   Does anybody want to make comics?
Anybody want to make comics, interested in making comics?
Okay, I'd like to start with giving you three compelling reasons why
comics are a bad medium, why you should stay away.
[laughter] Number one is comics take forever to make.
I have a really simplified drawing style.
If you've looked through my book, I don't use a lot of crosshatching.
A lot of my fellow comic book artists call me lazy.
But even with my simplified drawing style, it takes me anywhere
between four and eight hours to complete a page.
Now if you calculate that taking into account
that an average graphic novel is anywhere between 150 and 300 pages,
it just takes a really long time to do a graphic novel.
American Born Chinese took me about five years.
Now during that time I also was working full time and I got married
and bought a house and had a kid and got a Master's.
But even so -- [laughter] -- it takes forever.
So that's reason number one, comics take forever.
Reason number two, you'll slowly starve to death --
[laughter] -- if all you do is comics.
This is been changing recently,
but for a really long time there was really no money coming into comics.
When I started American Born Chinese in the year 2000, my friends
and I would go to these local comic book conventions
to sell our dozen copies -- [laughter] --
and we would go on these panels where we would listen to our heroes
of youth, all the artists that drew GI Joe and Transformers
and Spiderman and they would talk about how we were
about to see the death of the American comic book.
At that point, around the year 2000, the comic book market was shrinking
and folks that were incredibly popular,
incredibly influential comic book artists were having to do things
like video game magazine covers and storyboards for movies
in order to just make ends meet.
So there was really no money in comics.
Now since then there's been this tremendous turn around so
that nowadays, graphic novels is actually one
of the growing segments of the book market.
But at that time at least that really wasn't predictable.
So number two, not a lot of money in comics, although that's changed.
And third, comics don't make you sexy.
[laughter] Not even a little bit.   You can test this out.
Next time you want to hit on somebody, try this.
Okay, hit on two people.
The first one say, "I'm a novelist," and see how they react.
And for the second one say, "I'm a graphic novelist."
I guarantee those two reactions will be different.
[laughter] When I first met my now wife, I told her after a few months
of dating that I did comics and she looked at me and she said,
"Isn't that for third graders?"
[laughter] "Why are you still doing that?"
Now I've converted her since, but even so, the public perception,
although it's changing, is that comic book people look like that guy
on The Simpsons that runs the comic book shop.
[laughter] So those are three compelling reasons:
comics take forever, they eat up your life, comics don't have a lot
of money, and comics aren't very sexy.
So given those three compelling reasons,
why would anybody actually want to make comics?
For me, it starts with my parents.   I am the son of two immigrants.
My father was born in Taiwan and my mom in Mainland China
and they both came here for graduate school.
They met and fell in love and had me.
Now, they're both avid storytellers.
My father would make up stories off the top of his head
and they would always be about this Taiwanese village boy named Ahtung
[spelled phonetically].
Most of them were very scatological in nature.
[laughter] I was a big fan of scatological humor.
[laughter] I am still kind of a fan of scatological humor.
And for instance one of my favorites was Ahtung's dad would make him go
and pick up manure from the front of his house using a pair
of chopsticks and a rice bowl.
[laughter] I thought it was the funniest thing in the whole world.
[laughter] Later on as an adult I realized
that he probably was telling me these stories to make me grateful
that he wasn't making me pick up manure
with chopsticks in front of our house.
My mom took a more traditional route and she would read me stories
out of these Chinese storybooks
that her parents had sent her from Taiwan.
So I grew up in a household that was immersed in storytelling.
In addition to listening to stories, I also really enjoyed drawing.
My mom, as you were told earlier,
tells me that I started drawing when I was two.
So when you combine these two together,
well when I combined them together as a young child,
I came to the conclusion that I wanted
to be an animator when I grew up.
I wanted to tell stories with drawing and drawn storytelling,
the first form of drawn storytelling
that I was exposed to, was animation.
So all throughout early elementary school I had expected to grow
up to become a Disney animator.
I was actually a little bit obsessed with Disney.
On any given day I always had
at least three Mickey Mouses on my body.
I had a watch and possibly some underwear and maybe a belt buckle.
[laughter] In addition, I also had a giant poster
of Walt Disney's head hanging above my bed.
[laughter] My friends would come over
and would be really creeped out.
They would say, "Why do you have that picture
of an old man hanging over your bed?"
And I would say, "That's not any old man.
That is Walter Elias Disney."
[applause] So in any case, I wanted to be an animator.
This all changed in the fifth grade.
In the fifth grade my mom took me took to the local bookstore and back
in the day they had these spinner racks, these wire frame racks
where they kept issues of individual comics.
Nowadays it's a little bit different.
Nowadays they actually keep comic books
on the bookshelf like real books.   So it's a world apart.
But on one of these spinner racks I found a copy of Marvel Two
in One starring the Thing and Rom the Space Knight.
The Thing, you all know, he was
in a feature film this past summer, right?
He's part of the Fantastic Four -- large man made of rocks.
Ron the Space Knight, time has not been as kind to -- [laughter] --
he has unfortunately been forgotten.
But he's basically -- he looks like a giant robot and he fights space --
or he fights crime in space.
So I brought this up to my mom, this issue and I said
"Mom I really want this."
She took one look at the cover and she said no.
[laughter] Her reasoning was that the Thing
and Rom looked really scary and she didn't think
that my fifth grade mind could handle it.
So instead she bought me the latest issue of Superman.
Superman's very good looking, he's not scary looking at all.
I took this home and read it.
In this particular issue, it was 1984 at the time
that I purchased it, the atomic bomb drops in 1986, in the story.
It kills of the vast majority of the world's population
and the few remnants that are left establish this feudal society.
It's very chaotic.   There's no real government.
So these men dress up in medieval armor
and ride giant mutated Dalmatians
around the countryside fighting crime.
[laughter] And Superman, because of his superpowers,
survives the atomic bomb.   So, he teams up with them.
At the very end it all turns out to be a dream, but that did not stop
that story from freaking the living stuff out of me.
[laughter] I stayed up late nights thinking
about mutated dogs and about atomic bombs.
What it also demonstrated for me was the power of visual storytelling.
The power of comics, how text
and image together can accomplish something
that neither text nor image alone can do.
So pretty soon after that I hooked up with a kid
in my class named Jeremy Kunioshi [spelled phonetically].
He was also very interested in comics.
He had been collecting comics for a couple of years at that point
and had several long boxes.
We would be sent off to our local library by one of our parents
and we would sneak away from the library
to go to the comic book store.
[laughter] I apologize to all you librarians out there.
I'm really sorry.
[laughter] But we would do that and then that's how I got
into the comic book purchasing habit.
In addition, we started making comics.
One of the best things about the comic book industry
and the comic book medium is that the line between amateur
and pro is very, very thin.   It's very blurry.
You can barely see it.
If you want to be a pro, you can do it tonight.
This is what you have to do.
Go home and draw a comic book, then take it to Kinkos and Xerox it
and sell one copy to somebody.
As soon as you get that quarter in your hand, you are a professional.
It doesn't even matter if that quarter came from your mom,
you're still a professional.
[laughter] So it's a very, very blurry line.
And that's actually -- you can see that when you go
to comic book conventions.
I think comic book creators are among the most accessible,
professional storytellers out there.
You can go and meet your favorite comic book creator more easily
than you could probably meet your favorite movie producer
or even author, outside an event like this.
So we started making comics; we created two different issues.
The very first one was called Spade Hunter.
It was a super hero comic that was based off
of both Captain America and Robin Hood.
He threw a shield like Captain America,
but he dressed like Robin Hood.
[laughter] That was the original twist.
And the second one was Transsmurfers,
which was about Smurfs who could transform into robotic fruit.
[laughter] [applause] And these fruit could fly
around and fight crime.
[laughter] That was an amazing experience.
As you were told, we sold these around campus for 50 cents a pop.
We would color them by hand
because there were no color photocopiers at the time.
And then we took all of our proceeds and donated it to the Statue
of Liberty Fund so that they could restore the Statue of Liberty.
[applause] Thanks.
All $7.50 went straight to the Statue of Liberty.
[laughter] So comics really got under my skin.
Unfortunately for Jeremy, my cohort, it didn't,
and nowadays he's a radiologist working in San Diego making
about 12 times as much money as I am.
[laughter] But then in junior high something happened.
I got really interested in girls.
And that third reason, that third compelling reason
to not do comics really came into play.
One of my friends, who was about 12 times as popular as me,
he had actually in eighth grade, by the time he was
in eighth grade he had actually had three girlfriends.
So he came up and he told me, "You know, comics are a little geeky."
And I said, "You're right.   I gotta stop."
So I stopped.
In high school I got back into it by taking a class in --
at a local junior college taught by a man named Richard Becker,
who is still a working professional.
He does a book called Bloodthirsty Pirate Tales,
which is not for younger audiences, unfortunately.
And that class really got me back into comics.
So by the end of high school I was facing this dilemma.
Did I want to go into animation,
which was the very first thing I wanted to do as a child,
or did I want to go into comics?
Now when you compare the two, if you take a look at those three criteria,
for the first one, comics took forever,
animation takes more than forever.   Animation actually takes a lifetime.
I took an animation class in college
that finally convinced me it wasn't the medium for me.
It was a six-week class; I ended the class
with 60 seconds worth of stuff.
And that was after hours and hours and hours of work.
So on that level at least, comics seems like the better medium.
For the second one, or comics don't make a lot of money.
Animators actually have health benefits.
[laughter] So with animation you can actually make a living.
So on that level, animation seems to be the king of the hill.
For the third one, comics don't make you sexy.
Do this. Hit on two people.
Tell the first person you're a graphic novelist and tell the second
that you're an animator who worked on Lion King.
And see what the difference -- [laughter] -- in reaction is.
So animation might not -- you might not be super sexy,
but you got a little bit of sexiness going if you're an animator.
So two out of the three, animation seems to be the right medium.
Now there's one final criteria that I think really tips things
over for comics, and that is
that comics can be handled by a single person.
One person can oversee the entire production of a comic book.
That's not true for animation, and because of that,
I think comics is an incredibly intimate medium.
Back in the 1950s, '40s and '50s,
a lot of the most popular comics were science fiction based.
They were about people who could fly.
They were about space aliens and they were about spaceships.
I think the reason was because at the time that was one
of the strengths of comics.
You could do big budget stories without having an actual big budget.
And at the time the technology was not there to give you some
of those stunning visuals that could be accomplished in comics.
Nowadays computer technology has really rendered that advantage moot,
nowadays, when you have a movie like Spiderman that's just
as visually thrilling, if not more so, than the original comic.
So that's no longer a strength of comics.
The big budgetness is no longer a strength of comics.
Nowadays I think what you're seeing with the really popular,
well-received comics, is this intimacy.
When you read a well done comic book it's
like reading a page out of somebody's diary.
Not only can you see the person's words,
you can also see the movements of his hand.
And just like how you can tell something about somebody by looking
at their handwriting, you can tell something about somebody by looking
at the way they draw, by looking
at the way their hand moves across the page.
So nowadays the most popular comics,
the most well-received comics are things like Mouse and Persepolis,
where you really get this intimate interaction
between the reader and the creator.
And I think that's part of what we're seeing --
the revolution that we're seeing in comics nowadays.
Comics are becoming a serious medium because people,
comic book creators are taking advantage
of the inherent intimacy of the comics medium.
So let's say you want to make comics despite --
let's say you want to forgo your sexiness in order to make comics,
how would you go about doing it?
Well first, I told you, you can go ahead and draw a comic, Xerox it
and sell it for 25 cents.
There are several levels beyond that.
You can also do what's called offset printing, where you take it
to an actual, real live printer and they actually print it
up professionally for you.   That takes about $3000.00.
When I first started in comics I would do all offset printing
for all of my books.
I did three issues and then I ran out of money
and I decided maybe Kinkos was the way to go.
[laughter] In addition there's also something called the Xeric Grant
that you can apply for.   Everybody know the Ninja Turtles?
Two men made the Ninja Turtles; one was named Kevin Eastman
and the other one was named Peter Laird.
They made buckets and buckets of money
by creating the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Kevin Eastman took his buckets
and purchased the Batmobile from the original film.
Peter Laird established a non-profit organization
that gives money to self-publishers.
So that's another way that I started.
I applied for that grant and I got it.
And finally with the proliferation of computer technology now,
a lot of people are using the Web, as a way of getting into comics.
Web comics are becoming very, very popular.
There are several people
who are actually making full time livings off of comics,
unfortunately without health benefits,
but still full time livings.
Nowadays I think Web comics are sort of becoming
like the minor leagues of the comic book world.
Folks are testing out their skills in comics
and then eventually being picked up by real print publishers.
So at this point, I'd like to ask for any questions.
Do you have any questions?
Am I supposed to let you clap first and then they ask me questions?
[laughter] [applause] You don't have to [laughs].
Go ahead, miss.
Female Speaker: In comics what is your biggest inspiration
in the comic world as in the graphic novelist worlds?
Gene Yang: Well I draw inspiration from a lot of comic book creators.
Some of my favorites are Jeff Smith, who did a comic called Bone
and Osamu Tezuka, who did a comic called Astro Boy.
He did a billion, billion comics,
but his most famous is probably Astro Boy.
In the more literary world -- in the prose world,
I really liked the works of C.S. Lewis
and also a Catholic Japanese writer by the name of Shusako Endo.
He's written -- his most famous work is a book called Silence,
which I find really fascinating.   Thanks. Oh, go ahead.
Female Speaker: What do you teach and how does it impact your --
how does your career impacted your teaching or vice versa?
Gene Yang: I teach computer science at Bishop O'Dowd.
And nowadays I'm actually only a part time teacher,
because the other half of my time is spent managing the database.
I do all the scheduling for the school, which means I figure
out what teacher teaches in what classroom, during what period
and what students are in that classroom.
It's a real pain -- [laughter] -- to do that.
In terms of how my comics affect my teaching, first,
for several years I tried to keep them separate.
When I first started teaching I really wanted to be a cool teacher,
so I would immediately tell all my students that I made comics.
Unfortunately, their reaction --
at the time the comic book industry wasn't doing very well,
so their reaction was very similar to my wife's.
They said, "You know I used to read those in third grade."
[laughter] In addition they also whenever the talks got boring
in my class, they would try to ask me about my comics.
So I would say, "Okay, check out this factoring algorithm,"
and they would say, "Tell me about your comics."
[laughter] So after awhile I stopped telling them about it.
But with the release of American Born Chinese,
the worlds have sort of collided again.
Nowadays one of the ways I use comics in my class is,
in my programming class we use a language called Alice
which is created by some folks at Carnegie Mellon,
and it's a completely visually based, object oriented language.
So what they build are almost like scripts, and there are things
like -- there are pieces of the comic book language
that are being used in that programming language
like word balloons and such.
So that's sort of how they've integrated.
Female Speaker: Thank you.   Gene Lang: Go ahead.
Female Speaker: As a first person -- as a first generation ABC,
how did your mother react
to you being an animator and/or comic book artist?
Gene Lang: My mom has always been somewhat supportive
because she's had artistic inklings herself.
My dad was a different story.
When I was in college I went to UC Berkeley and my dad said,
"If you major in something practical then I will leave you alone
after you graduate."
[laughter] So I majored in computer science.
I minored in creative writing and I majored in computer science.
After I graduated I worked for two years
as a programmer and he left me alone.
[laughter] Then, I started drawing comics
and I decided to go into teaching.
I started getting little envelopes in the mail with newspaper clippings
of salary scales of programmers, help wanted ads for programmers --
[laughter] -- how hot the computer industry were.
And that went on, it lulled a little bit during the dot.com bust,
and then it came back and it went on until I was nominated
for a National Book Award and a Chinese newspaper reporter came
to visit me at my school.
The next day there's an article published in the World Journal,
which is this Chinese language newspaper that's distributed
in America and my dad stopped sending me those letters.
[laughter] [applause] Go ahead, sir.
Male Speaker: What made you decide to choose the comic book medium
in order to tell your story of American Born Chinese?
Gene Yang: I think that the comic book medium is still,
in America at least, is still like a vastly unexplored territory.
It's traditionally been so focused on the superhero genre
that there are many, many more genres
that I think are more appropriate to the medium that haven't been tapped
and I'm interested in tapping that.
Female Speaker: Could you talk a little bit about why you decided
to write the story of American Born Chinese
and why the three different segments of it?
Gene Yang: Sure.
I had done a few graphic novels before this, two of them,
one was called Gordon Yamomoto and the King of the Geeks
and the second one was Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order.
They both starred Asian American protagonists, but they didn't deal
with the issue of ethnic identity head on.
And I felt like I really wanted to do that.
It had been such a important part of my own growing up process
that I wanted to talk about that.   Now in terms of the three stories,
that was largely a result of indecision.
I wanted to do an adaptation of the story The Monkey King.
I wanted to do something that was a little more naturalistic,
a little bit more like my own personal experience.
And then I had the idea of doing this crazy sitcom
with this really stereotypical character as the main character
and I couldn't decide which one I wanted to do first.
So after awhile, I thought --
it started almost as an intellectual exercise.
I wanted to see if I could bring those three ideas together.
Go ahead. Female Speaker: How long does it normally take you
to finish a comic?   Gene Yang: Oh forever.
Forever. Female Speaker: Forever?   Gene Yang: Yeah.
I mean, it's -- it just takes forever.
It's such a labor intensive process.
Like for American Born Chinese it took me five years
and then the two previous books took me about two years each.
So I've been -- I've been doing comics for about 10 years now.
Go ahead. Female Speaker: How did you find the courage to be able
to take a hobby that you had when you were younger and turn it
into an occupation when you were older?
Because I know a lot of people think of comics as only being for children
and they don't think of it as a medium for older people.
Gene Yang: I think you have to do it for the love.
All the folks that are in comics now I think are in it
because they really love the medium.
They believe in the medium and they believe in the power of the medium,
especially for American artists.
I think there's a lot of untapped potential in this medium
that we really want to see come forward.
[end of transcript] LOC - glyang 12 5/13/10 Prepared
by National Capitol Captioning 2820 Washington Blvd #2 (703) 243-9696