When asked what it feels like to come full circle, Yang laughed as if still a bit in disbelief: “The whole thing is pretty nutty, for sure.” year is 1946, and the Lee family has moved from Chinatown to Downtown Metropolis. Plus, DC asked Yang to write its newest series, New Super-Man, which stars a Chinese version of the super hero. He’s also been writing ten issues of Superman for DC comics.

Lately, he’s been working on the continuation of Avatar: The Last Airbender for Dark Horse Comics. But he found that the story also resonates with people beyond the Asian-American community: “That book is about the experience of being an outsider and wanting to fit in, and I think those are pretty universal things.”Īfter continuing to make comics on the side, Yang finally transitioned to doing it full time about one year ago. “I just thought through my own relationship with my cultural heritage when I was a kid and I drew on that,” said Yang. Although the work is fiction, Yang pulled heavily from his own experience to write it.

The award-winning book offers a complex story about Chinese-American identity. Then, in 2006, Yang caught his big break with a graphic novel called American Born Chinese. Plus, the rising popularity of Japanese manga in America was inspiring a resurgence of the industry in the early Aughts. Meanwhile, however, the literary graphic novel genre began to gain popularity and win awards that were typically reserved for prose. “So that was the industry I was entering… I just did it because I love it.”įor work, he became a teacher at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland. “People were predicting that Marvel was going to go out of business completely and it would take most of the comic book stores in America with it,” said Yang. Yang didn’t expect to be able to make comics for a living, mostly because the industry appeared to be going down the drain. “It was not that much different than what I was doing in sixth grade,” he said. Yang would Xerox the book himself and sell copies at local shows in the East Bay. His first self-published comic as an adult was called Gordon Yamamoto the King of the Geeks, a story about a kid who gets a spaceship stuck in his nose and ends up befriending the alien inside it. In junior high school, his interest dropped for a bit, but after graduating from UC Berkeley in the mid-Nineties, he resumed his craft. Within a few weeks, he and his best friend started making their own superhero comic books and selling them to classmates for fifty cents.

Gene yang superman