GEEKDAD.com Profiles Yang's Latest GN: _Level Up_

Gene Yang has another kids/adolescent-friendly graphic novel debuting in a few months. Level Up tells the story of a kid who want to live a life full of video game playing while his dad has made it clear an M.D. should be in the boy's future. Yang says it's also another example of "Pop Art," or comics' proclivity for exploring father/son relationships. Well, he doesn't use the term "pop art" exactly. I think Art Spiegelman coined that partifcular usage of the phrase....

Gene Yang joins Hamline University's MFA Program, as a Professor!

Hamline's MFAC (Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults) program is expanding to include graphic novels and comics.

Very, very cool.

For more info on Hamline University, a graduate school of liberal studies based in St. Paul, MN, click here.

Inner Kanye Says, "Gene Yang Doesn't Care About White People!"

Sorry, my inner Kanye got the best of me for a moment.

The link embedded in the title of this post actually refers to Yang's thoughts on the upcoming movie, The Last Airbender (which should have been called Avatar, but some small independent film that debuted last year and nobody ever saw had already claimed that title). The movie directly and overtly cast white people in roles that should have gone to Asian actors, in Yang's opinion. This made him upset, so he did a comic about it.

I find virtually every aspect of this phenomena interesting, but I'm not ready to come down on a side yet. I'm not a viewer of the cartoon the movie's based upon, but Yang makes me want to watch it. On the other hand, I think Yang is putting some words in the mouths of a group of nebulous, apparently white Americans.

Yang certainly has a lot of pull right now, especially among teachers. I'm very interested to see if his argument gains ground, and, if so, whether it'll be lauded or critiqued. I'm also interested to see what else this "shakes out" regarding people's honest opinion about things.

Me? I hadn't planned to see the movie in the first place.

Review: _Prime Baby_

Gene Yang's Prime Baby, recently collected into graphic novel form after being serialized in The New York Times, is a cute, clever, and endearing story about young Thaddeus' childhood megalomania and how it connects him to his family, especially his new baby sister, who just happens to be an interdimensional portal for peacenik aliens intent on bringing smiles and happiness to the Earth.

In Thaddueas one can see a deep-rooted sense of sibling rivalry dueling with the desire to be loved. He's at once a disturbing little boy with an alarming adolescence-level egocentricism and someone with whom anyone with brothers and sisters -- anyone who has ever wanted to be the center of the universe, really -- can relate easily.

This undercurrent of allegorical depth (in Prime Baby, wrapped in the tension of Thaddeus as exceptional while also archetypal "everychild") in otherwise seemingly mundane stories is beginning to be part of Yang's signature. It's certainly apparent in The Eternal Smile. Yang is adept at taking the ordinary and giving it a little symbolic "umph!" While no other work he's produced has been as multifaceted or as meaningful as American Born Chinese, which is beginning to stand as the exception rather than the rule in his repertoire as Yang publishes more work to a wide audience, it is comforting to know that Yang is established enough now that we can see braided threads in his storytelling. I'd rather see more of the complexity inherent in ABC than the essentially playful, "oh, isn't that interesting to note" levels of relevance in the rest of his opus (that I've read to date), but it is important to point out that Prime Baby represents earlier work from the artist rather than an evolution of his craft.

Fun, relatable, worth reading, but not life-changing or particularly exceptional, Prime Baby offers hints of complexity in a storyline otherwise relatively innocuous.

The ALAN Review Fall 09 Has 2 Articles on Comics

The "seems to get mentioned in clumps on En/Sane World," indispensable Peter Gutierrez makes the case for eleven graphic novels in your classroom in "Integrating Graphica into your Curriculum," and West Virginia University's Rosemary Hathaway impresses in "'More than Meets the Eye': Transformative Intertextuality in Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese." Both are great reads!