Gene Luen Yang Quotes

If you want to, if you are a crazy person, you could go from idea to the stands in about four months. It does not cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a comic the way it does to make a television show or a movie.

But there's still an avenue for smaller comics and personal expression.

Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers.

Let me tell you, writing comics is as hard as anything I've ever done - for me, at least. I'm now officially in awe of guys who can crank out multiple books a month and maintain a high level of quality. Comics are completely different than any other medium I've dabbled in.

Wanted has gone into second, third and fourth printings of the individual issues and the north American printings of Wanted #1 are now close to 100,000.

I created lots of characters in high school and college, and the first character I created in pro comics was Liana, Green Lantern of M'Elu, for a backup story in 'Green Lantern #162,' my first professional sale.

In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.

When I'm working on comics, I have to give myself a million deadlines, or I'd never get anything done. Comics are just so hard to make - I find it very difficult to motivate myself.

At any comic book convention in America, you'll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.

One of the key characteristics of the comic book medium is that it is not brought to life by just one voice.

Jerry often says that Slam Bradley was really the forerunner of Superman, because we turned it out with no restrictions, complete freedom to do what we wanted; the only problem was that we had a deadline.

If all else fails, there's always print or web zines.

The summer of 1991, I took $2,000 of my savings and a desktop program, and I asked my friends to write 800 words about something they cared about. I got eight or nine articles and put them together. It was no frills, black and white, no graphics. I printed them out and just dumped piles around D.C.

With Groo, I try to do one story every book. Sometimes the stories are better if they go a little longer, and I choose to do it in four issues.

If I could write rock & roll songs on purpose, I'd do it all the time. But most of what I write comes out slow and sad because that's most of what I listen to.

There are so many ways to make a book or comic, but most involve doing something online.

Not long after I started posting the first 'Nimona' pages online, a literary agent reached out to me, and I ended up signing with him before I returned to school for my senior year.

It's absolutely chilling to think that I've been working on a comic-book series called 'Optic Nerve' since I was sixteen.

The method of producing comics in Japan is very hectic, but it's also rewarding because it's possible to do both the story and art all by yourself.

I would not be in comics if it weren't for independent creators like Kate Beaton, Jess Fink, and Emily Carroll. That's where I found my start and inspiration, through women who did it themselves and built a career on their own terms.

I was a junior at school, and I had just taken my first comics class, and we were doing an exercise for this other class where we had to create our own characters, and 'Nimona' just kind of came out of that. I decided that I liked her so much that I wanted to do a comic with her.

As a poet and writer in general I feel very grateful that I can just make a chapbook and that we don't have the expenses of filmmakers.

I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel - hell yeah, I'm going to do that.

Baltimore was never intended to be anything other than this original novel that Chris Golden and I did together. There was never any thought of this thing going on and becoming a series. If there's any common thing between these characters, it's that they weren't anything I was seeing in comics. Almost everything I've done is something I wish somebody else was doing, because it's what I'd like to read.

It's frightening and exhilarating. It's like combat. Look at the metaphors: You kill when it works; you die when it doesn't.