When you work on a pre-existing character, when you end up getting invited to be part of a legacy character like Superman, I don't feel like it would be true to the character if all I did was go in looking to express my own voice.
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.
Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.
There's something about the intimacy of comics that gives you a false bravado; you don't always consider the consequences.
For 'Boxers and Saints', the tension between Eastern and Western ways of thinking was very personal for me, and I needed to control every aspect.
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.
'The Green Turtle' wasn't all that popular. He lasted only five issues of Blazing Comics before disappearing into obscurity.
I grew up on monthly comics. My closet is full of monthly comics. I've always wanted to do a monthly comic, and while I've had a couple of offers, the timing has never worked out. Most superhero comics come into the world as monthly series, so we wanted the same for 'The Shadow Hero.'
The most labor-intensive part of putting together a comic is the drawing.
My brain subconsciously limits itself to panel compositions that my hand can actually draw.
As I was researching, I was struck by how similar the Boxers were to Joan of Arc. Joan was basically a French Boxer. She was a poor teenager who wanted to do something about the foreign aggressors invading her homeland.
'Avatar: The Last Airbender' is, to my mind, the greatest American animated series ever produced. The characters lived and breathed.
'Avatar: The Last Airbender' creators Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have, along with their team, painstakingly planned out the Avatarverse.
I think there is always romantic tension between Lois Lane and Clark Kent.
The rumor is Chu Hing really wanted the 'Green Turtle' to be Chinese American, but the publisher didn't think that would sell. If you read those books, the hero almost always has his back facing the camera so you can't see his face. When he turns around, his face is obscured.
Superman was created in the late 1930s, and humankind's idea of what the future would be was very different.
For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood.
I never worked a job that required research. I'm not really good at it, to be honest.
Many Japanese families moved to Taiwan during the occupation. Then, when the war ended, they were forced to move back. And at the macro level, the Taiwanese had every reason to cheer when the Japanese left. The Japanese military could often be incredibly brutal. The Taiwanese lived as second-class citizens on their own land.
Both my mother and my father grew up in Asia, in a time of political instability. They'd earned college degrees before setting foot in the States but had to work menial jobs early on in order to make ends meet.
