It consists of three distinct storylines whose themes eventually coalesce around racism, transformation, and self-acceptance. In its original form, American Born Chinese’s coming-of-age tale combines some of Yang’s real-life experience growing up in the Bay Area with fantastic elements of the Chinese classic Journey to the West. Now, more than 16 years later, the graphic novel has evolved even further from its humble beginnings at Kinko’s into a big-budget TV series created by Kelvin Yu ( Bob’s Burgers). In 2006, the series was published by First Second Books, and it became a New York Times bestseller, a winner of the Printz and Eisner Awards, and the first graphic novel to be a finalist for a National Book Award. He would write and draw each issue, go to Kinko’s to make copies and staple them by hand, and then sell them to his friends or at local conventions in small numbers. When Gene Luen Yang started working on American Born Chinese in 2000, he had been making comics for only about five years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |