Gene Luen Yang Quotes

I've done work for hire. I've worked for DC and Dark Horse.

My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the '80s, but nothing ever came of it.

When I first quit my day job, I was terrified. I called my editors and said I'm trying to make a go of this, and they threw every contract at me they could. And for two years, I had a book or an anthology out every month.

Digital-Original just shifts the R&D costs for publishing to the authors and affords us the chance to write the stories we want to write and the stories our patrons want to read.

I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics.

What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.

I'm working on my own work, my own publishing company.

I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.

I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.

That and the fact that I knew that nobody was going to publish my work at Dark Horse or DC or anywhere.

I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.

I had been laid off from 'Entertainment Weekly 'right before I started writing 'Gone Girl.'

I've probably written some books - I know I've written some books that were more interesting to me than to a large audience, but that was mostly when I was first getting started in academia and writing for a narrow audience.

It's a fascinating world to drop a finished product on the marketplace without the intercession of a publisher.

I really do love 'Panama.' But I'd also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that, I wouldn't even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn't be published. I'd be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.

A cool thing about enthusiast press is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can decide they want to set out on this path and start publishing immediately.

My career path is the weirdest thing. I was a hairdresser, I worked at Marvel for a few months, and then I was signed to a DC exclusive for eight years.

The Village Voice gave me an outlet. They encouraged writers to publish idiosyncratic, intellectually ambitious journalism in voices that ranged from demonic to highfalutin. And they paid me well once the magazine was unionized. Getting paid is motivational.

Comics publishers are used to looking in a very, very narrow focused prism. It's like when I started writing 'X-Men.' Our 'meat and potatoes' money was made of newsstand sales, while anything that came through the Direct Market was considered gravy.

We'd been on Geffen for a long time, and I think we felt that we needed a change. I just don't think we felt very close to the people at the label after all this time or that they understood what we were trying to do. I don't have any regrets, because at the time we signed with Geffen, it was the right thing to do.

My three years in Manhattan were sort of my university years. I was learning by myself, and it was a tough time. That's when I began writing articles for newspapers back home about life in New York. This interest took over, and I moved from painting to writing.

Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.

I went to Columbia film school; that's where I met Matthew Weisman. We then became writing partners, graduated, and moved out to Los Angeles. I didn't know a soul.

The dirty little secret about comics is that the wall to getting published is actually not that high. You can publish your own comic. You can have your comic printed by the same people that print Marvel and DC and Image's comics for, I think, it's about $2,000 for a print run. So you can Kickstart it and get your own comic made. It depends on what is considered success to you. So if you need to be published by the Big Two to feel that you've made it, well, you should start working very hard.

As I see it, mainstream comics now speak only to the hardcore few who stayed; conversing in a weird, garbled, visual pig latin only they can understand - rendering the term 'mainstream' a hollow joke - while the true mainstream, the other 99.9% of the populace, find enjoyment elsewhere.