Gene Luen Yang Quotes

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality.

Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.

I had a lot of ideas on how comics worked and pretty early on I had this idea that it would be fun to explain them in comics form.

Comics as art. I do comics as comics, and my opportunity to tell stories. Simple. Basic. Let the characters have the excitement, not the package. That's where I come from.

Comics have always been storyboards.

Comics are not theatre - there's a very important difference in that the reader controls the page. You can linger on a page of comics as long as you want. You can read and go forward and then move back; you can reread, in one sitting or at your leisure. You can take as much time as you want to take in that story.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

Comics don't work without the visuals, obviously.

I've said this before, but I don't like putting captions in my comic books. I feel, for me, they become a crutch, a way to ignore the essential fact that our medium is a visual medium, and the greatest pleasures to be derived from comics are how stories can be told with pictures.

I've always preferred comics that really rely on visual storytelling. It's what makes comics special. Otherwise, you're better off reading a novel.

Storytelling is one of comics' esthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist's problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of "writing," the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience. As far as I'm concerned, that's really all I've been trying to do formally for the past decade or more with comics, and it's certainly time-consuming, since it has to be done with drawings, not words.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

I just really respond to comics. I find it a really exciting medium.

Some of my earliest work was in comics. I tend to think in pictures and always like to write scenes possessing the dynamic you find in comics.

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.

The difference between graphic novels and web comics is even greater than graphic novels and story boarding. Web comics really is a legitimately separate genre.

In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.

With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.

I think you can do anything with comics that you could do in just about any art form.

Graphic novels are such a visually creative world - it's really interesting what they can do in one sketch. Now I'm hooked.

The way I process things, they way I express myself, is in comics, just as poets process things that they are trying to understand.

Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper.

My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling.

But with comics you're reading and assimilating an image simultaneously, instead of just reading or watching the tube.