Plus, the cartoonist previews his next book!
Thank you for alerting me to awful stereotypes Id never known about.
GENE LUEN YANG:Well, thanks for reading it.
Credit: Albert Law
And Im sorry aboutBreakfast at Tiffanys there are other merits of that movie besides that one character!
What exactly is your role as the National Ambassador for Young Peoples Literature?
The broad strokes are that Im supposed to promote reading among kids.
Gene Luen Yang / First Second
Were supposed to venture to get more kids reading, and kids reading more.
Specifically, what that looks like is doing lots of speeches.
Im going to be going to these different book festivals and doing events there.
Ill also be speaking at different schools and libraries.
Were trying to figure out a tech thing we can do, too we just started a podcast.
Its kind of janky, its basically me recording on my phone.
We only have one episode up so far; its me talking to the former Ambassador, Kate DiCamillo.
Yes, shes amazing, as a human being and as an author!
How did you come to your platform of reading outside your comfort zone?
So thats how we started: How can we address issues of diversity in a positive way?
So if a kids never tried a graphic novel, we want them to try a graphic novel.
If a kids never tried a prose book, we want them to try a prose book.
Do you feel like graphic novels are being taken more seriously these days?
We just started hitting theNew York Timesbest-sellers list in like… 2003?
What do you think was the tipping point where graphic novels started to get more mainstream acceptance?
I dont know if there was one tipping point.
I think it was sort of a collective effort.
And then the underground comics movement came around with Robert Crumb, and all of his contemporaries.
Then the alternative comics movement came, and there was Lynda Barry, the Hernandez brothers.
Art Spiegelman put outMaus,which was huge and won the Pulitzer prize.
Craig Thompson put outBlankets,there was Daniel Clowes…
When it finally reached a critical mass, your average person would know what a graphic novel was.
A lot of us are definitely beneficiaries of the folks that came before.
If someone wanted to start reading graphic novels, what books would you have them start with?
It depends on how old they are.
If theyre middle grade readers, I would chooseSmileby Raina Telgemeier.
Theres alsoMeanwhileby Jason Shiga, which is a choose-your-own adventure book and I think its amazing.
If theyre a little bit older,Mausby Art Spiegelman is shockingly good.Persepolisby Marjane Satrapi.
They set up their own government, they create their own flag, and its hilarious, too.
Its amazing, but no one ever talks about it anymore!
They dont say who those are, but that gives you around [when it was published].
Lets talk about your next project.
All I know is its about basketball which you werent always into.
Okay, so if you saw me physically, you would know: Im definitely not an athlete.
You look tall in pictures!
Yeah, well thats the only thing, right?
Because height is not genetically linked to coordination, which was my huge problem when I was a kid.
So, as a kid, I always sucked at sports especially sports that involved some kind of ball.
The ball would always end up hitting me in the head, and basketball was the worst.
I feel like for junior high boys, being good at basketball was the way you proved your masculinity.
And I just always sucked at basketball, so I never liked it.
at like 9:50, they would pause the movie to watch basketball highlights in the news.
It drove me crazy.
I never understood why people liked it.
Then, just recently, I started slowly getting into it.
One reason was I have a son who started getting into basketball.
I read it primarily because it was about Chinatown, but it was about basketball in Chinatown.
It was an amazing book, nonfiction.
And then Jeremy Lin: He feels like somebody I could have hung out with in high school.
So those things kind of converged and got me interested in basketball.
Hes super confident, he walks around campus with his chest puffed out.
He walks like a quintessential athlete: He has a swagger to his walk.
Essentially, what I learned was why basketball is important.
Why people care about it.
Do you have that distilled down into a sentence?
Whydopeople care about basketball?
I can tell you whyLoucares: Lou is actually an alum of that school, Bishop ODowd High School.
He graduated in the late 80s, and he was on the basketball team.
When he was a junior, he went to the state championship with his team.
His coach was, at the time, the best high school coach in California possibly the nation.
They went to state, and they were down by 1 point with 7 seconds left.
And then, the referees invalidate that last shot.
So, supposedly, his hand was in there.
And I gotta say, on the replay, its really hard to tell.
Even the commentators on the team he lent me the tape of that game.
Its hard to tell.
But the ruling stood, they lost the game, and that moment kind of haunted Lou.
Thats what basketball was to him: Almost achieving something, and having it taken away.
He comes back to his alma mater to be a coach.
As assistant coach and later as head coach, he led five teams to the state championship.
They lostall five times.
So all together, as a player and a coach, hes lost six times.
As a school, weve gone to the championship eight years and lost all eight times.
And the 14-15 school year was the year they were supposed to finally do it.
Is it a spoiler if you tell us what happened?
It was the craziest game I have ever seen.
They made it to the championship game.
Their opponents were the team that they last lost to the last time they were at the championship.
If he just makes one of them, we win.
I followed themallseason, and Ive never seen him miss a free throw.
He air-balls his first free throw.
And Lou, the coach, this guy who walks around campus with all the swagger I watched him.
Everyone else was yelling, jumping up and down, and he just starts crying.
He starts crying, and then he calls his old high school coach, whos really sickly.
He couldnt go to the game because hes in a wheelchair now.
We finally did it.
I cant believe thats a true story.
Yeah, I was shocked at the material that I got by following them for a season.
I cant believe this just dropped into your lap.
What have you learned about yourself while working on this book?
I learned there actually is a lot of commonality between basketball and things that I do know about.
I grew up in the Chinese Catholic community, and theres something very religious about basketball.
There are rituals that occur in every basketball game, there are things that are held in reverence.
There are numbers… its almost like patron saints.
There are certain patron saints in the world of basketball that people look up to.
I feel like theres a certain tradition there that extends beyond the sport.
