A Quote by Gene Luen Yang

When I first started making comics, I was living with a bunch of guys, old college friends. We had this deal. At the end of each day, they would ask me how far I'd gotten on my comic. And if I hadn't made my goals, they were supposed to make me feel really bad about myself. They happily obliged.
I got into comics about the same time as music. By 12 years old, I had discovered my dad's killer comic book collection filled with Silver Age books from his youth...early Spider-Man, Thor, Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Detective Comics, Action Comics, you name it. Seeing those old books got me interested in new comics, so my friends and I would hit the local comic shop every Saturday to pick up the cool titles of my generation.
When I started playing music at East Tennessee State University I would sit on a stool with a tip jar in front of me and play four hours a night at a college bar called Quarterback's Barbecue. I wasn't thinking about doing it for a living. I was just making enough money to go to Taco Bell every day. People were eating chips, drinking beer and not listening to me. I'd had three or four years of people ignoring me, and I'd kind of gotten used to it.
We need to set goals for ourselves. Start today...if you don't have any goals, make your first goal getting some goals. You probably won't start living happily ever after, but you may start living happily, purposefully, and with gratitude...Goals are gratitude in action. They give us the opportunity to build on what we already have. While achieving goals can be a lengthy process, we can learn to be grateful for each stage in the process of setting and meeting goals.
I literally make music for my wife and my friends. I don't feel beholden to my fans. I don't even really know who they are. But, I know that this whole thing started with me making stuff that I got off on, and I've gotta believe that that's how it's going to end, too. That's the only way it can go. There are a lot of artists who have gotten pretty caught up in that. That's why I like the defeatist attitude. Just assume that no one is going to like it and that no one cares, and you'll end up making something that you really like.
I would go with my husband to the tailors where he gets his shirts made, and I would watch the bespoke process. I would ask them, "Would you be able to make that for me?" And they would always say, "Well, yes, but no." They were very French about it. I decided I would just do it for myself. And I started doing that. Then other people would notice, and want it. So I started doing things for friends, little pieces, and my own line grew that way.
Honestly, before I started working at the comic shop, I was not a huge comic reader. I grew up reading 'Archie' and have an incredible love/hate relationship with Archie Comics. I got back into it when I started living with some roommates who were really comics fanatics.
I have to go into the studio to make my second album knowing I'm making an album. When I first started making songs I didn't have an album in mind, that's why a lot of them I like - I'm talking about how I haven't got a deal, how I'm living, you can never really top the first time, but we'll see how it goes.
The first time I shopped at a comic shop, it was because I had been published in a comic book. As I became more involved in comics, I started going more and more, usually to support my friends or lady-friendly comics.
I had my group of friends, and they stayed my group of friends, they were good about that. We all started to succeed at the same time, so that sort of took the curse off it. I didn't have a bunch of people scowling at me and being potentially jealous. I just had good friends who I was able to help, and they helped me. Yet it eventually came to feel debilitating.
I really did feel like I was surrounded by family members. I didn't have a dad, and I remember there were all these guys - in the old days, there were no women, except a makeup artist or, occasionally, a script supervisor. So there were just guys who taught me how to, you know, whittle wood, or how to pull focus, and what the camera was doing. And if I was being bratty, they'd sit me down and tell me. There were lots of rules about not being late and making sure that you didn't spill anything. So it felt a little bit like I was in a family.
It's a lot of accumulated joy and tension and all kinds of emotions just pouring out of all us. We've all been preparing for this day and we all knew that one day we would just have to move on with our lives and careers even though we all love this show and love working together. But it's still an incredibly emotional time, especially for me with a lot of journalists asking me how it feels about FRIENDS coming to an end. It's started to make me think very deeply about what it's all meant to me and that's made me ever more emotional!
I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't stay too long. I would get out at the top of my career and not be one of those guys who's body had started to go away and sag and look like and old man trying to still make a living.
I'm supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing.
When I first started out in comics they would put me on these Women of Marvel panels, and these young women would come up to me and say, "I really want to write comics but I don't know if I can because I'm told that it's just for guys." I would say, "That's bullshit. That's absolute bullshit. Look at me!" But the one area where we still need to work on is that we need more women of color. That's not common thing yet.
There was a long time in my life where I made music that I thought my friends would like, or that I thought would get me a record deal, or what I thought I was supposed to make because that's what I was seeing in mainstream. I didn't know myself; I didn't find myself musically or, in real life.
Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
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