![]() They’re made up of friends and family and my editors, and I take their feedback very seriously. I have a group of beta readers that I rely on. If you really want to make money, this is not the way to go.ĭraft panels from Gene Luen Yang's Boxers & Saints. And it’s crappy because even now, even though comics are so much more popular than they were in the ‘90s, even though graphic novels are this big thing within the American book market, they’re still kind of a crappy way of making money. Even if you don’t want it to be, the financial aspect is still there. Now that I have responsibilities that I didn’t have when I was in my 20s-I didn’t have kids that I have to put through school and that I have to feed-I feel like money has to part of the equation. If you had asked me at the very beginning, when I started making comics as an adult, what success would be, it would just be simply to tell a story that is compelling enough to get the reader from the first page to the last, where the reader wants to find out what happens at the end. When you’re working in a medium that was once on the brink of extinction, you cannot define success in terms of money-because there is no money. At that point, I have to push through to the end or I would never finish a book. I really think it’s like a marriage: in the beginning you’re in this honeymoon phase and you think it’s awesome, like, “This will be the best book I’ve ever done.” And then somewhere along the I feel so close to the project that I’m lost and I can’t really tell if it’s good or bad. I always hope that it’ll break even for somebody, either my publisher or me or both. But if you’re doing something new and different that maybe has never been done before within the medium, I think that would be a success as well. Success in terms of a piece of art, I think, is to make a comic that gets the reader to the last page. But you can have a book that doesn’t break even at all that’s still successful as a piece of art. I think that the easiest way of defining failure in terms of money is whether or not you break even. There’s the artistic level and the more practical level, and you can fail in one way without failing in the other. I think there are two levels on which failure operates. If you feel like you need to get a perfect first draft out, you will never take risks and you’ll never experiment. I’m a firm believer that you should feel as free as you want to be in that first draft-free to fall on your face. So you have to give yourself the freedom to do that. But you’ll never find out until you do it. And when you do that, inevitably, you’re going to hit failure because the reason why it’s never been pushed that way is because it’s a bad way to push it. ![]() There’s a certain definition of artistic success where you’re doing something that’s never been done before, or pushing a medium in a way that it’s never been pushed. In his own words, here’s Yang on how his definition of success has evolved over the years, and what Spiderman taught him about failure. Yang, who had aspired to work in comics since grade school, also teaches creative writing at Hamline University. Yang was also a featured speaker at the 2014 National Book Festival Gala, where he spoke about how the fear of failure is a stumbling block to telling more diverse stories. Yang pushed through, however, and since then, has garnered a second National Book Award nomination for the two-volume Boxers & Saints (which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and developed the graphic novel iteration of Nickelodeon’s popular cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender, among other projects. ![]() He and his collaborator, Lark Pien, spent several years in rewrite mode after his editor broke the news that the nearly finished comic simply wasn’t good enough to publish. According to Yang, however, his next project was less successful. ![]() In 2006, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese became the first graphic novel to become a National Book Award finalist and to win the American Library Association’s Printz Award. ![]()
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