We hope you enjoy our first ever crossover podcast with the guys from the Perfectly Acceptable Podcast. We met at their studio in The Comics Place to discuss the works of Gene Luen Yang. We review the amazing Secret Coders books and current issues of New Super-man. Jeff, Django and I had nothing but praise for the writing of Gene Luen Yang.
In between our banter, we discuss clips from my interview with Yang at Emerald City Comic Con in March 2017. We talk democracy, computer science, the MacArthur Genius Grant, basketball and how Gene is the nicest guy in the world.
Thank you to Jeff and Django for the awesome conversation. Special thanks to Gene Luen Yang for being one of the best guests and creating stunning stories.
Image Courtesy of DC Comics
Regina: This podcast was recorded at The Comic’s Place in Bellingham, Washington. Special thanks to Django and Jeff for being great co-hosts. The interview with Gene Luen Yang was recorded at the Convention Center in Seattle, Washington in March 2017.
Special thanks to Gene and his wonderful work. This episode was edited by Jeff Figley from the Perfectly Acceptable Podcast and Natalie Moore.
Speaker: Here we go!
[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element around
[♪ Music playing ♪]
Regina: Welcome to Spark Science. This is our first crossover podcast. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. This is where we share stories of human curiosity. That’s our tagline, but I’m here with comic books and fun stuff and we’re here with Comic’s Place. I’m gonna let them introduce themselves and start their podcast.
Jeff: Well, yeah. So, here we are with the Perfectly Acceptable Podcast crossover.
Speaker: [Making shooting sounds.]
Jeff: Yeah, yeah! Regina was wonderful enough to ask us to be included in this. But yeah, I’m Jeff.
Django: I’m Django.
Jeff: Where usually every Tuesday we get together and sort a bunch of comic books and pull them and then go home and read them and talk about them, this is a special edition version of that podcast.
Django: Special.
Jeff: Hybrid. Crossover.
Django: The specialist.
Jeff: Very in line with comic books and physics crossovers.
Regina: And actually, I start every podcast with saying I teach physics and astronomy at Western Washington University, but you have some — Django — you have some science background too. So, before we get into all this, I kinda want to talk about that and give you some science cred.
Jeff: I mean, I want to know about Django’s science background.
Regina: Jeff doesn’t even know.
Django: I do some coding.
Regina: You did a lot of coding.
Django: I’ve coded a lot of websites, mostly in PHP and MySQL. A little bit of JavaScript recently.
Regina: But you did this for like a living before the Comic’s Place existed.
Django: Some days I still do it for a living.
Regina: Really?
Django: This place doesn’t pay me. [Laughing.]
Regina: [Laughing.] You mean comics don’t pay?
Django: No, no.
Jeff: Common misconception.
Regina: Yeah.
Django: Yeah. Comics pay other people.
Regina: Right.
Django: I’ve got some experience with coding. I never really went to school for it. I kind of picked it all up on the fly. I probably have a terrible base, but I can make things work.
Regina: It’s like my physics.
Django: Sure! [Laughing.] I know when I fall, that’s physics.
Regina: That’s true. So Jeff, you did not know that he’s a computer scientist?
Jeff: I know that he’s a coder. He does —
Regina: I like how you’re like, “I’m not gonna elevate it to that.”
Jeff: I thought you meant maybe like “scientist” like I immediately pictured Django in a white lab coat.
Django: You don’t know me bro.
Jeff: Yeah, I don’t. I don’t.
Django: Oh, we need lab coat day at the shop.
Regina: I don’t have a lab coat. I’ve never worn a lab coat.
Jeff: Well, and I really liked that portion of your interview with Gene talking about trying to move the common vision of what a scientist is beyond the standard Doc Brown: white lab coat, big glasses, hair frizzing out.
Regina: Right, white guy.
Jeff: Yeah, oh, absolutely.
Regina: I mean I don’t mean to throw that in, but —
Jeff: No, no.
Regina: So, let’s tell our listeners who we’re talking about today. We’re talking about Gene Luen Yang and he is the writer of Secret Coders, New Superman, he was the writer of Superman — I don’t have the comic. Which one was that?
Jeff: American Born Chinese is his big book. Boxers and Saints.
Django: He wrote a bunch of the Avatar.
Jeff: Yeah, he writes the Avatar stuff.
Regina: Avatar: The Last Airbender series. Oh my god, he writes all of those.
Jeff: Yeah.
Regina: Shadow Hero, which is amazing and has a little free comic at Panda Express. Go to Panda Express right now and get that comic because it’s actually really entertaining.
Django: I actually really want to read that one because it’s about the first superhero in China. Is that right?
Regina: It’s the first American — Asian American superhero. For you listeners who listen to Comic’s Place podcast, you can go to SparkScienceNow.com and watch one of our first videos. It’s with Gene Luen Yang and we talk about the Shadow Hero and how it was actually written in the 1930s and it only had like 3 issues — sorry 6 issues. It was written by an Asian American comic book artist and nobody knows who he is now.
People say he really wanted to make the character Asian American but the publishers were really against that. So, every single panel is drawn with the back of him. You never see the face. He did that out of silent, passive aggressive protest.
Django: Wow.
Regina: So, Gene Luen Yang and his buddy Sonny the artist put together kind of a new reboot version of the Shadow Hero in a cool graphic novel that came out like five years ago. It’s really, really good and basically a continuation of that story is the Panda Express one-off side story.
Jeff: Cool. And I read the beginning of Boxers and Saints, which is a box that he did that, yeah, is the story of the Boxer Rebellion told from both — it’s two different books —
Regina: In like 1914 or something.
Jeff: Yeah, both perspectives.
Regina: — or 1904, I don’t remember. Listeners, you should Facebook us and tell us the actual dates.
Jeff: Yeah. Please, please correct me when I’m wrong, which is gonna be most of the sentences. But he’s got a body of work that absolutely fascinates me. He combines fiction and history.
Regina: And like mysticism kind of, which is really cool.
Jeff: And then just science and coding in there as well.
Django: That’s a type of mysticism.
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. Hey, I’m a big mysticism fan. I just had to make it fit real quick.
[Laughing.]
Regina: Science was magic before it was explained, right?
Jeff: Well, Arthur C. Clarke. Any highly advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic?
Django: Oh no, that was Thor. Thor said that.
Jeff: Oh, never mind. Thor quote.
[Laughing.]
Regina: His astrophysics girlfriend said that, right?
Jeff: Well yeah, Jane Foster. That was while he was also doing some coding.
[Laughing.]
Regina: Hey, I think coders are scientists.
Django: He coded the hammer.
Jeff: I agree. I’ve got a narrow view of things I can’t wait to broaden.
[Laughing.]
Regina: Let’s give Gene his other titles too. He’s the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, appointed by the White House when Obama was still president. He’s also McArthur Genius fellow. So, I interviewed him at Emerald City Comic Con. I think this was just this year. I think a month ago. I don’t even know. Time flies.
Django: Early March.
Regina: So, I interviewed him a couple months after that happened. I was saying like, “What was it like? What did you go through?” So we can —
[Switches to audio of interview with Gene.]
Regina: I saw you almost exactly a year ago when you were at Western Washington University. Since then, what has happened to you in your life?
Gene: Well, I had a bunch of deadlines some of which I was late for. Then, a big thing was that I got this call one morning when I was on my way to Panera Bread. It was the MacArthur Fellowship program. They decided to give me a fellowship which is shocking and crazy. Basically, I was pulling out of my driveway. I got this call from an unrecognized number. I picked it up. I normally don’t do it; I don’t know why I did it that morning. They told me I was going to get this grant. I just pulled back in my driveway and I sat there for like an hour. It was a shock to the system.
It’s been amazing. I feel like I got a chance to — because of the spotlight that came with the MacArthur announcement, I got to talk to lots of different folks about the Reading Without Walls program that I’m doing with the ambassadorship.
Regina: And that’s still going on.
Gene: Which is still going on, yeah, which we’re doing a big push for this April. Macmillan who’s my publisher, they’ve really gotten behind it. They’ve created this activity kit for teachers that has like worksheets and buttons and bookmarks and all sorts of awesome stuff.
[Switches to audio of podcast.]
Regina: After I met him the first time at Western — this is before the MacArthur Genius fellow and actually before a lot of stuff started blowing up. So, he was a little bit more — he was easier to get to.
After the interview, he sent me an email because I was like, “Thank you for talking to me.” We had to work through his agent. We were talking about my background and we were talking about being Asian American growing up in small towns and talked about being half Mexican half Chinese. He literally sent me an image — I got an email from him and it was just an image and it was an image of a Mexican-Chinese bakery. That’s all it was.
[Laughing.]
I was like, “Cool. I think we’re friends now.”
[Laughing.]
Before we get into kind of sciencey stuff, I want to do the comic stuff, like your realm. So, Django and Jeff’s realm. We’re gonna talk about New Super-Man, which came out when?
Django: Uhh, 11 months ago?
Jeff: Yeah, when the rebirth initiative started. Yeah, so it’s been doing a monthly thing, so it’s at 11 now.
Django: It’s like the second wave of rebirth I think.
[Switches to audio of interview with Gene.]
Gene: That’s been a ton of fun. DC this past summer had a rebirth event that reset the storyline. It wasn’t a hard reset, but it was a soft reset. It also I feel like reset the creative energy within the company and I feel it as somebody that works for DC. I totally feel it. Part of the DC initiative was this Chinese Superman character that they wanted to introduce. This was not my idea. The Chinese Superman was not my idea.
Regina: Right, we’ve talked about this before.
Gene: Yeah, it freaks me out. Doing it freaks me out.
Regina: Well, and the undertones of like communist China and stuff. I’m like, “Are you scared?”
Gene: No, I’m not scared for myself. I wanted to know if it would be okay for me to just talk about whatever, right?
[Switches to audio of podcast.]
Regina: Yeah. So, Gene talks about rebirth and like the thing that happened before rebirth. He tries to explain it to me. You can hear in the interview that I’m just nodding and I’m like, “I don’t know what this means.”
[Laughing.]
Can you kind of elaborate on rebirth? Why the thing — that whatever that was called – new genesis or what is it?
Django: New 52.
Regina: Why was that so crappy? I want to know about that.
Jeff: About six years ago, the heads at DC were like, “Wow our sales are low right now. All of our series are at like 900 or like 150.” They felt like there was a really large barrier to entry for a lot of new readers.
Regina: Oh yeah. They would be right.
Jeff: Yeah. So what they did is they took all of their main series. They cut it down to just 52 series. They started them all back a number 1 in an attempt to get people to be able to be reading the books. Ultimately what that did was really confused people with like, “Well I have this comic book of Superman dying when he finds Doomsday from the ’90s. You’re trying to tell me this didn’t happen? I have it right here in my hands.”
Regina: Yeah.
Django: Yeah, they mixed up all the continuity. They changed a lot of the characters. It worked well for about 2 years.
Jeff: About 2 years and then —
Regina: Well, ish because people didn’t like it.
Django: They liked it for the first — most of it was pretty well received for the first two years and then it just took a nosedive.
Jeff: The way that they describe it is sort of death by a thousand cuts. They realized they were starting to make all these very slight changes to these characters in an attempt to gain readership, but they had sort of lost what those characters were.
Regina: They probably lost some of the base, right?
Jeff: Oh yeah. Yeah, by the end of the new 52, so they made it 52 months, that’s about 5 years.
Regina: Ugh.
Jeff: Yeah, by the end I was only reading like two DC books.
Regina: Wow.
Django: And Jeff was reading as many as anybody was.
[Laughing.]
Regina: What happened to, let’s say, the kind of newer characters? For instance, when I was a kid I watched a lot of the Batman animated series. I know that there were comics that came out of that. Like, Harley wasn’t even in the comics. She was on the show before she became her own comic. What happened to those comics then? Nothing?
Django: They still — no, I mean DC is one big universe so, when they rebooted it, everybody got kind of a new origin.
Regina: Ugh.
Django: So, like Superman spent most of his childhood in a government bunker, right?
Jeff: Well, that was the flashpoint story.
Django: Oh my God. Yeah, I couldn’t even track it and I’m a DC guy.
Jeff: They basically were trying to say like, “We’re not gonna say this stuff didn’t happen, but we’re just not gonna look at it.”
Regina: Mmm.
Jeff: So, they were still printing these books and they were still putting them out like, collections of these older stories. But in terms of the monthly books that were coming out, it was a much more narrow focus on — it was very “of the now.” Like, we want to get people reading these books now and they can jump on now and we’ll start all over. It’s all gonna go super well. It obviously didn’t.
Rebirth has been going for about a year now and they’re still in the process of writing an actual reason behind why the universe shifted. They’re throwing in things like the Watchmen and they’re writing a larger narrative.
Regina: Which gave me nightmares I should add.
Jeff: As a kid, yeah.
Regina: Not as a kid. I’m way older.
Jeff: I guess that’s true. That was the ’80s.
[Laughing.]
Regina: I read it like in the middle of grad school. Not when it came out. So, yeah, let’s talk about his — so, new Superman. He talks about how he was approached and he really didn’t want to do it at first. I understand, being like the ethnic — having to do the ethnic comic. But, it’s a really good series.
Jeff: It’s a really good series.
Regina: He eventually was convinced.
Jeff: Yeah, I was surprised to hear that they had brought that up to him again as just sort of — you know, I’m dumb. But truly, it seemed like a strange almost out of nowhere — like we wanted to be doing this and they got him on this book. It’s 11 issues in now and he’s doing something really, really, really unique with it. What I love about it so far is there’s these constructs, like superheroes that exist. We know them and are so familiar with them from our Western perspective. You’ve got an idea of what a superpower is. He’s taking a different cultural viewpoint of those same constructs. So, the way they talk about using chi in this to access his powers.
Regina: It’s not hokey. It’s actually done well.
Jeff: No, it’s internally consistent, but it absolutely makes sense that everything can be viewed from a lot of different perspectives and we’ve only known this one. It’s not just an insulting like, “Oh, these characters over here.”
Regina: Right. It’s not patronizing.
Jeff: No, it’s a holistic reanalysis of these things that we’re familiar with. I did not realize the depth of storytelling that was going on there. He’s also reaching just way into the bag of DC comic book storytelling.
Django: It’s not a cover of Superman. It’s inspired by Superman and Batman and Justice League, but it’s not just the Chinese version of those characters. It’s “What if this was built from the ground up with kind of the same shadow behind it all.”
Regina: He messes with those misconceptions. He plays with people’s biases. In the very beginning, Gene knows that you’re like, “Well this is just an Asian Superman and there’s a Chinese Batman and he’s a little fatter.”
[Laughing.]
Then there’s a Chinese Wonder Woman.
Django: A reporter girlfriend.
Regina: A reporter girlfriend. It’s all very shallow and then it all of a sudden — you fall into the deep end. I would really suggest listeners to read this comic, because it gets into the fifth issue and you start seeing very big themes of democracy versus communism and who’s actually right and who’s actually in charge and good and bad and just a giant struggle. It’s very, very interesting.
[Switches to audio of interview with Gene.]
Gene: So I dropped the word democracy in the first issue just to see what they would say and they’re like, “oh let’s do it.” But then we did do something. We did do something that they pushed back on.
Regina: Ooh.
Gene: In China, the internet is censored. The internet is filtered. People debate about whether or not that’s appropriate. Us as Americans, we mostly say it’s not. But in China, they have this debate about whether or not it’s appropriate. Those who are more on the side of freedom of information, they have created these code words to talk about the things that they want to talk about. The Chinese language has a lot of homonyms so they use homonyms to say things.
Regina: Like horse and mother.
Gene: Yes! Yes, you know your Chinese!
Regina: I do know. I don’t know the word homonym though.
Gene: That’s actually one of the homonyms.
Regina: Yeah, it’s a big one.
Gene: Yes, it’s a big one.
Regina: Yeah, and death and four.
Gene: And death and four, exactly. Wow, you’re on a roll. You’re on a homonym roll. Roll is a homonym in English.
Regina: It is, yeah. Like Rickrolling.
Gene: Yes, like Rickrolling. So, in China, if you put up a webpage, you say certain words like “democracy” it will replace that. They’ll filter that out, right? So, people who are like freedom of information, freedom of expression activists in China, they’ll embed homonyms in their documents.
Regina: In their benign documents.
Gene: — that sound benign, that sound innocuous, but are actually homonyms for terrible things.
Regina: Wow.
Gene: So, one of the most famous is grass, mud, horse. If you do a search for grass, mud, horse, you’ll see all these like cartoons of alpacas and stuff. But the reason why they put grass, mud, horse into these documents is because grass, mud, horse is a — can I swear?
Regina: Yeah, you can swear over podcast.
Gene: Okay, you can bleep this out, but grass, mud, horse is a hominem for “f*** your mother.”
Regina: Oh, yeah yeah yeah. I know this. Yes!
Gene: You know this, right?
Regina: My mom told me this bad word, but go ahead.
Gene: About grass, mud, horse, right?
Regina: Yeah.
Gene: So they put grass, mud, horse in there. They put like cartoons of alpaca and it’s all directed at the people who are filtering the internet. They are basically saying, “F*** your mother” to the people who are filtering the internet.
Regina: Wow, interesting.
Gene: So, the original plan was to have a Chinese joker who was named grass, mud, horse.
Regina: And they were like, “we’re not gonna do that.”
Gene: Yeah, because he’s like, you know joker is kinda chaotic, right?
Regina: Yeah, he’s chaotic neutral. Well, no, chaotic evil.
Gene: Yeah, he’s chaotic evil. But I think one of the reasons why they want to filter the internet is because they’re worried about the chaos that comes with freedom of expression.
Regina: Right. Then having joker be that — I don’t know — he would almost be working with them. Joker wouldn’t really be a villain then.
Gene: Exactly. So, the Chinese joker is not necessarily a villain. Originally the plan was his name would be grass, mud, horse. But we put out the first issue with him in it and he says grass-mud-horse, but he doesn’t say that his name is grass-mud-horse. So when the second issue comes out they’re like, “We need to change it.” So we changed it. So he’s called the alpaca now, so it’s close.
Regina: So close.
[Switches to audio of podcast.]
Regina: Jeff, you were saying that there’s this character that’s kind of like a trainer for the New Super-Man and he — Kenan, is that his name?
Jeff: Mmhmm.
Regina: His character is kind of honoring earlier — really really early — comics. So, what did you discover that I did not even know?
Jeff: What I discovered was, they introduce a character who — is he a villain in this series?
Regina: I don’t even know. We haven’t read enough.
Jeff: I think he’s a villain because it’s original character, what they did is they — a character is revealed.
Regina: We’ll post this — I took a picture of the character in the New Super-Man comic compared to a character on a 1937 comic. We’ll post that picture and you’ll see the similarities.
Jeff: What Gene did was he introduced a character and then exposed the fact that it’s actually the character from the cover of Detective Comics number 1 from 1937.
Django: That’s 27 issues before Batman.
Jeff: Like before Batman. And he writes it so fluidly into the story that the reveal of the character’s face is actually the cover of Detective Comics number 1 down to the credits on the page being similar to the flavor text on the cover.
Regina: Yeah, it’s uncanny looking at it.
Django: And his word balloon, “I am the very beginning.”
Jeff: Yeah. Then a couple issues later we realize that that appearance is a disguise and the disguise is meant to play off of stereotypes and fears. He even uses the text of Batman, like “I’m gonna become a bat. I’m gonna prey on” —
Django: Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot.
Jeff: Exactly, that’s what he says. So he’s saying like bad guys are a cowardly and superstitious lot and he plays on these superstitions. It’s just an instance of somebody taking a huge amount of respect and deference for comic books as a whole. Gene says his very first comic was DC Comic Presents 57, which is super old, but it shows that he’s been reading Superman since he was in elementary school.
Regina: Right. He talks about that also in the interview because his mom was like, he wanted swamp thing but his mom was like, nah nah. That’s gonna be too scary for you. Do Superman.
Jeff: Yeah, and that shows through in this work. It shows through that there’s somebody who loves comic books and is —
Django: He knows this stuff. He didn’t necessarily have to research it to find the character that — in this case, he knew this cover. He didn’t have to like slog through tons of old images of racist DC comics from the ’30s.
Jeff: Yeah.
[Laughing.]
Regina: I remember the racist comics. I got it.
Jeff: The way he incorporated that racist cover into it and —
Regina: And he turned it around. He reclaimed it, which I really like.
Jeff: I found a whole bunch of articles online basically about him reclaiming that character. It was a big news thing about two months ago. He’s doing amazing jobs using comic books as a medium to combine with other — he’s not relying on comic books as just a source for entertainment. He’s combining it with education. So, he’s not working within the bounds of comic books. He’s using comic books as a tool to accomplish a larger goal.
Django: Yeah.
Jeff: And doing things like using them for education is amazing. Secret Coders taught me things I did not know.
Regina: Did you not know binary?
Jeff: No. I did not know —
Django: It explained binary to me in a way I had never considered.
Jeff: Yeah, like I’m a psych major so I’m just like “let’s talk about feelings,” not —
[Laughing.]
Regina: Again, I’m a scientist. I know I was taught binary at some point, but literally I read this with my — at the time she was six or almost 7 — and I’m like, “oh yeah, I did not think about it like this.” Now it’s like in my head, like I cannot get it out because my daughter will start writing numbers in binary all the time.
Jeff: In bird eyes.
Regina: Yeah, actually she’ll say that. She’ll be like, “I’m the bird and bird eyes would be this.” We were talking earlier about how my daughter taught her whole first grade class, because like you said, Gene is not only doing this for education; he made these worksheets that go along with these books.
Django: Definitely all ages, but I wasn’t bored. A lot of time you read something that’s written for kids and you’re like, oh yeah, this is definitely written for kids. This one, I was entertained. I was pulled through the whole first issue and then book 2, I was really excited to read book 3 when I got to the end of that.
Regina: Mmhmm, you’re like, let’s get this.
Django: Jeff and I were sitting up here and I was wrapping up book 3 and I was just in the bean bag giggling in the shop. That’s pretty special.
Regina: Gene had made that comment. We can play his comment about — gives me a little hint about what’s going to happen.
[Switches to audio of interview with Gene.]
Regina: I really, really enjoyed Secret Coders.
Gene: Thank you.
Regina: I love the second one. Actually, my favorite part of the first one was when all the birds go crazy and all their eyes pop open and the only way to get them to shut off is to show them that — spoiler alert — show them that number zero. That scene was so intense for a comic book.
Gene: Oh, well thanks, thanks.
Regina: Dori really liked that too. She was like, “Oh, this is genius!”
[Laughing.]
She was like, “This makes so much sense” (as a six year-old).
Gene: That’s awesome. That’s awesome.
Regina: It’s so amazing. What kind of reception have you had from Secret Coders dealing with computer science or comics? I don’t know. What has that experience been like for you?
Gene: Overall it’s been great. I do hear from readers and parents of readers every now and then. It seems like there’s like this core of nerd kids that really gravitate towards those books. I’m hoping that as the series goes on, they’ll continue to support it. Working with Mike has been awesome too. He’s fast and he’s talented and it’s been a dream.
Regina: His artwork is so awesome. It’s so like, I don’t want to say bubbly, but —
Gene: It’s energetic.
Regina: It’s energetic, yeah, and it’s not sharp. It’s just like this really welcoming drawings. It’s really great.
Gene: Very friendly, very charismatic drawing. He’s awesome. He’s great. So, we’re in the next few books. So, in book three, we are gonna reveal more about the secret behind the school. In book 4, 5, and 6, they will actually leave earth. That’s the grand plan.
Regina: Oh my god.
Gene: They’re gonna leave earth for a little bit.
Regina: They’re gonna leave earth?
Gene: They’re leaving earth.
Regina: That is amazing. So, you’re bringing in like — because Eni plays basketball and so does Hopper. Now, you’re bringing in space. You’re bringing in so many nerd elements, like robots.
Gene: Well not necessarily space. I didn’t say they were going to space; they’re just leaving earth.
Regina: Oh. I don’t understand.
Gene: [Laughing.]
Regina: Now I have to actually read this. Nah, I’m going to anyway.
[Switches to audio of podcast.]
Jeff: So, a thing about Secret Coders. It does a thing that I’ve only seen at one other point right now in my life, which is there’s a book called Flintstones that’s coming out. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Flintstones.
Regina: I used to watch it. [Laughing.]
Jeff: But there’s a comic book coming out and it’s written by —
Regina: You just did a podcast with the creator — well the writer.
Jeff: Yeah. What he does is he packages really complex socio-political issues into issues of a comic. So, each issue is like a stand-alone story and he takes one or two disparate discussions that need to be had and he wraps them into a cute little narrative that you can deal with it in. Secret Coders does the same thing. He is taking —
Regina: So many things.
Jeff: So many incredibly educational things and then packaging it into a story. The fact that he’s combining textbook material but doing it as a narrative — that is an advanced thing that’s combining — that’s like synthesis. It’s very advanced alchemy.
Django: When’s the last time you had a textbook with a cliffhanger?
Jeff: That’s true. That I wanted to like — well let’s get to the next — did I do that algorithm right?
Regina: Exactly. He’s like, “Hey, why don’t you try it out before you turn the page.” It’s so interactive without a lot of effort.
Jeff: Yeah.
Regina: I like what you said about so many complex things because one of the things I instantly picked up on because being a mixed kid myself. You know Hopper is like mixed. Her mom’s Asian, her dad’s probably white. I saw a picture of them.
Jeff: That reveal was so well done.
Regina: Right? The Chinese teacher, she’s like “mom!” You know?
[Laughing.]
Jeff: It’s like, wow, you were really rude to this teacher. What’s going on?
Regina: Right. Why are you such a jerk to this teacher? And then it has like jocks versus nerds. It has moving to a new school. It has private school issues. It has parents separating issues. It has all these things that are just very complex, but he’s so good at just sprinkling them in enough that you get it’s happening, but you’re not drowning in it.
Django: Yeah, it’s not heavy-handed at all. The whole thing feels very natural, even when you realize you’ve suddenly learned how to code a robot.
Jeff: It’s books like this that get me excited about the comic book medium, because I love your standard superhero comic book and I love a linear narrative that’s gonna get us from A to B in any of the books that I’m reading. But it’s things like this that are pushing the industry or the medium in a way. It’s not challenging in that it’s difficult, but it’s challenging in that it’s progressive.
Regina: Right.
Django: Yeah, it’s more than just a comic book. There are a few — I mean, there are also superhero comics that do something similar here where they’re like, “Yeah this is a comic” but it’s doing it in a more thoughtful way or in a way that hasn’t been done before. This is taking the whole thing and saying, “I’m gonna do something that comics hadn’t really thought to do yet.”
[Switches to audio of interview with Gene.]
Regina: I want to bring us back to what you were saying about making materials for teachers. Where is that gonna go? So far you have these comics where you have activity sheet where you can do binary. You have these videos that kind of teach kids to do a logo. So, what is the next thing that you want to kind of integrate into the classroom?
Gene: Well, we’re doing more videos. I need to do more videos. We want to do at least a handful by the end of the year. Then, we’re talking to some other folks to see if we can level up a little bit. Because right now it’s just me, right? It’s just me and sometimes I’ll get some support for a second to make this stuff. We’re trying to talk to some folks to see if we can level up a little bit and put out more stuff.
Then, on the Reading Without Walls side, we have a lot of teaching material. So, what they’ve done with Reading Without Walls, I’m hoping we can figure something out for Secret Coders as well with like workbooks and bookmarks and all sorts of stuff like that.
[Switches to audio of podcast.]
Regina: Well, I want to bring it back to what you were saying of the intertwining the hard things and hard issues and hard stories and difficult challenging narratives and actually weaving them all together. That’s basically American Born Chinese. That’s his first graphic novel ever that he made.
Jeff: It won an Eisner.
[Laughing.]
Regina: Right. I said to him, I was like, “I read this in two hours. I just consumed it.” He was like, “Yeah well, it took me five years, but cool.”
[Laughing.]
Regina: But, yeah, that’s how he writes. If you read Avatar: The Last Airbender, if you read New Super-Man, if you read Secret Coders, any of his work, it’s about stories being intertwined. Like, that’s what it’s about.
Jeff: Yeah, American Born Chinese is three separate stories that are all part of a larger story but they —
Regina: Spoiler alert, come together at the end.
Jeff: Yeah. Super, super cool.
Django: Jeff and I were talking earlier. I read Secret Coders and then I sat down to read a handful of the New Super-Man and I was reading the New Super-Man at a Secret Coders’ speed because I had just finished the third book in a row of kind of kid-level plotting. Then I was reading the New Super-Man and the dialogue is very similar to the Secret Coders but there’s a lot more going on on every page, like more to digest.
Regina: Right. I was doing that too.
Jeff: Then I got a damn, and I was like “Woah.” Secret Coders, you can’t say that!
[Laughing.]
Regina: No, we just heard Gene swear, so he does. It’s crazy.
Jeff: It also has like — there are a lot of other parallels where there’s like the absent parent.
Regina: Yeah.
Jeff: A lot of the character stuff that’s happening in these. It doesn’t really mirror the other, but he’s definitely got themes that he’s using.
[Switches to audio of interview with Gene.]
Regina: So, then the last time we talked you had a new project, so before we go back to Secret Coders, you had a new project where you followed basketball players around.
Gene: Yes, I’m still working on that. It’s just coming out super slow. It’s called Dragon Hoops.
Regina: Dragon Hoops. That’s awesome.
Gene: I’m still working on it, yeah.
Regina: So, tell me more about that because I think you talked about it very little on our last time or is there not much new?
Gene: No, I didn’t grow up a basketball fan. I hated all sports because I was terrible at them.
Regina: Right, cuz if you’re not good at it then never try.
Gene: Exactly, what’s the point? What’s the point if you’re not good at it? Anyways, after I started teaching high school, I would hear about the basketball team at the high school, cuz we had a great basketball team. But I rarely went to the games. Eventually though I started getting interested in basketball, partly because my son started playing.
Regina: Is he really tall?
Gene: He’s okay, he’s okay. He’s not one of the tallest kids in the class, but he’s okay. But he likes it. I started striking up conversations with the coach of the varsity men’s team at the school and we became friends. Then I learned this crazy story about him.
He’s an alum of the school and he was on the basketball team when he was a student. His junior year, the team went to State. He wasn’t the starting point guard, but he was the backup point guard. The team went to State. In the last 7 seconds of the game, his team was down one point. He gets the ball in his hands. He puts it up at the buzzer. It goes through the hoop, so they’re supposed to win. They freak out. He’s like hugging the coach and then the refs invalidate that last shot because of offensive goal tending.
Regina: What?
Gene: Supposedly one of his teammates had his hand on the rim as the ball was falling through, which is a no-no, right?
Regina: Right. Well, I didn’t know that, but —
Gene: But this dude, okay, so this coach. His name is Coach Lou. Coach Lou has that tape. He shows it to me. He plays me that tape. He goes, “Look at the tape. Do you think his hand was actually on the rim?”
Regina: So, he’s still feeling it.
Gene: He’s still feeling it. He’s like 45 now. He’s still feeling it.
Regina: [Laughing.] This is like 30 years later. Oh my God.
Gene: Yeah, it was in the mid ’80s that he did that. I gotta say, it’s hard to tell if his hand was actually on it. So, he goes on. Lou plays for UCLA and then Clemson which are big basketball schools. Then he gets this injury, ends his playing career. He comes back and coaches as an assistant coach and then later the head coach. He has led 6 teams back to State and he’s lost all 6 times.
Regina: Oh my God, so he’s cursed.
Gene: Yeah, so he’s cursed. It seems like he’s cursed.
Regina: Like Bruce Lee.
Gene: The school is cursed, because they went to State once more without him as a coach or a player and they lost that too.
Regina: This is terrifying.
Gene: So, the school has lost 8 times. They’ve gone to State 8 times, they’ve lost every single time. So, the season that I followed them, supposedly was their best chance at finally winning state. So that’s why I follow them.
Regina: Wait, and the end of the book is if they win or lose?
Gene: The end of the book is if they win or lose.
Regina: Okay, we won’t say anything.
Gene: Well, they had to make it to state and luckily they did.
Regina: At least that happened.
Gene: Yes, at least that happened.
Regina: How can he not be more angry every single year?
Gene: I know. He’s like a really calm dude. That’s something that I noticed. Being somebody who’s not an athlete watching these athletes. When I was a kid, I just had a lot of animosity towards athletes I think.
Regina: Yeah, so did I.
Gene: But now as an adult watching these 14, 15, 16 years-old compete, I realize that when you’re an athlete, you’re constantly dealing with failure. As a writer, I do too, but it’s much slower.
Regina: Not this year! [Laughing.]
Gene: It’s much slower. Like for them, they make a shot. It’s an air ball in front of everybody. The whole crowd reacts and they have to keep playing.
Regina: It’s like baby — not even baby — it’s like little shots of defeat over and over and over again. They have to deal with it. They’re just — I don’t want to say desensitized — they maybe just learn how to deal with it better and better every year.
Gene: Yes, they gotta figure it out or they’re off the team or they leave.
Regina: Yeah.
[Switches to audio of podcast.]
Jeff: You know, a thing that I like about his writing that was particularly demonstrated in Issue 11 here is it doesn’t have that overabundance of just like sexualized characters.
Regina: Not at all.
Jeff: In here, there’s even just sort of like — at one point he’s talking about this female Flash character who is actually from the Flash rebirth series and is now over in New Super-Man —
Regina: Cool.
Jeff: He’s talking about like, “Do I have a crush on this girl?” And he’s like, “Nah, no she’s not really my type.” And then at one point she’s like, “Are you just falling behind so you can be checking me out?” He’s like, “You’re not really my type.” He brings it up, but it’s not really a thrust of the book, which is — in Western comics, that’s a lot of it — and TV shows as well. It’s sort of the “will they, won’t they” dynamic of storytelling.
In Secret Coders as well, it’s just not a part of it. I really love when people don’t use that — like romantic tropes. I’m really tired of that. I like a story that doesn’t even need to bring it into it. So, the two main characters in the Secret Coders are just like awesome friends and they’re in whatever great.
Regina: I do need that, because I’m a shallow, shallow person.
[Laughing.]
Jeff: At this point, reading comics, I read enough that I’m sort of just —
Regina: I don’t get a lot. I read textbooks.
Jeff: Yeah, there’s no romance in a textbook.
Regina: I like what you’re saying though because he doesn’t focus on it, but it’s still there. If you’re somebody like me, you still have enough to like — I mean, in New Super-Man, he likes that reporter girl. It’s very — what do I want to say — formulaic. But, in Secret Coders, they’re kids. But I mean, you know what? They’re good friends. They might grow up.
Django: You missed the make out session in Issue 3.
Regina: No.
Jeff: No, they make out in Issue #3? Okay, good. I was like, “no, I love that they’re just kids.” We don’t need to be telling kids that when you see somebody of the opposite gender, you immediately have to question are you attracted to them or not.
Regina: Right.
Django: I forgot this isn’t just our podcast. Kids might listen to this Jeff.
Jeff: Oh, that’s good. We’re good. We got that.
Regina: No, it is true though. You’re right, it is refreshing that you can have a series where you can actually. I mean, they do this in New Super-Man. They kind of celebrate friendship. That’s Avatar: The Last Airbender. I mean, there is romance, but there’s just a lot of friendship. That is a relationship that is very strong that we all care about as humans that isn’t really investigated and explored enough in this genre.
Jeff: It’s not! It’s because like, what’s the payoff of friendship? It doesn’t have the “will they, won’t they” dynamic, but I think it’s something — particularly right now — needs to be pressed upon more. People need to be making more friends and not necessarily trying to rush the point of “is this my romantic partner or not?”
Regina: Umm, but yeah. I like what you’re saying about the not hitting you over the head with these like common things.
Django: There’s some subtlety there.
Regina: Yeah. He’s all about subtle. That’s all Gene Yang is.
Jeff: And broadening cultural horizons, but not beating you over the head with it. And not being like, “You’re dumb, you didn’t know this.” It’s more like — it introduces questions that view cultures in a positive light. Just like, I was talking about, you know, that Superman accesses his powers by concentrating chi into different areas of his body. That’s a really interesting exploration of superpowers, but then it begs — there’s like a symbol that he focuses on when he’s doing that. It made me be like, “What’s this symbol?” It made me want to do independent learning about this that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Regina: That’s what basically makes a good educator. I’m teaching a science communication course this quarter and we had this clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson and he’s talking about how to say a good sound bite. How do you do a good sound bite to make sure that people are gonna actually want to learn science? Part of it — I think he says it has to be tasty, it has to make them feel good, but it also has to leave them wanting more. To be a good educator is to kind of — what do I want to say — kind of inspire people to kind of find the stuff on their own.
He said like, you know, I have these — he’s in a museum — Neil deGrasse Tyson, he’s a director of a museum. He’s like, “I have these kids for what? An hour? But they’re in school for 5 hours a day, 200 something days a year.” He’s like, “I only have this amount of time, so I have to be brief, but I have to inspire them to actually look for things themselves.” I think that these comics do that. I think that’s what you said. They give you the confidence and, I don’t know, to be brave enough to go look for this stuff on your own. The courage. The bravery.
Jeff: With both education and just art in general, I think that the creator or the educator is extending something towards the participant or the learner or the reader. But again, the person on the receiving end has to make a gesture. They have to seek learning as well. You can’t just tell somebody something. Information and opinions are the byproduct of synthesizing information yourself. You have to make it your own. So in doing that, you have to have a proactive approach to it. So, how do you make people want to have a proactive approach towards learning things? This does it — Secret Coders through entertaining all-ages narrative. Superman similarly through superhero tropes.
Regina: It’s ownership. You have to give them their own ownership of it.
Jeff: Yeah, you have to encourage them to like — I’m giving you this, you have to come to — it’s a dance.
Django: Do we know how many issues he’s got planned for New Super-Man?
Regina: No, we should email him.
Django: A lot of times a creator will have a set number of issues that they have in mind and then they’ll pass the reigns off to another creator. I don’t know who —
Regina: You’re like scared now. Like, “I don’t want it to leave, Gene!”
Django: What would happen if they gave this to Scott Snyder or, you know? It could totally fall flat but this is a DC character. It’s not Gene — it’s not his character. This belongs to DC. He’s not gonna always write it forever and ever.
Regina: Yeah.
Jeff: I wonder if they’ll end it without him.
Django: Yeah, do they stop when he stops or do they give it to someone else? How do they make that decision?
Regina: But I think that you’re right about Gene and how it’s so great that he was so excited about basketball because he made it his own story. It’s a coach that works at this place that he is friends with, that he cares about this outcome, he cares about this guy’s psyche, right? Him going a little insane.
Django: Well, he found the human part of the basketball story. Obviously that’s what he likes is the people in the stories as much as the larger Superman punch-em-up stuff. A good comic book and a good book generally comes down to the people over the plot I think.
Regina: It’s complex people. We’ve talked about this before. This idea of this is why people don’t like Superman because he’s too simple. He’s too shallow. He’s just good and everything.
Django: You gotta be a great writer to write a great Superman story.
Regina: Exactly. In the very first issue of New Super-Man here, Gene Yang basically makes him a giant jerk. If you read American Born Chinese, and this is going all the way back to his first graphic novel, that kid is not the best. We talk about being the ideal minority, being the model minority. If you’re gonna write about a person of color, it’s really hard to write them as a full, complex person because you don’t want to build on stereotypes, but you also don’t want to be a saint, because we’re not saints. We’re normal people.
Same thing with Shadow Hero. If you read Shadow Hero, his mom is a really complex, not the greatest mom, but she’s not a bad mom either. You need to realize that people are complex.
Jeff: The mother in Secret Coders is similar.
Regina: Yeah, it’s true.
Django: Yeah, she’s a butt [sp?] for most of it, but then you find out why.
Regina: Yeah, third book. Gotta read it.
Jeff: I do. I can’t wait to.
[Switches to audio of interview with Gene.]
Regina: So, I am gonna ask you this. What is the next thing you’re gonna do past basketball? Or is that like your next big thing?
Gene: Yeah, that’s the next big thing. We’ve been talking about what we might do next but nothing’s landed.
Regina: When is the national ambassadorship? When is that over?
Gene: It ends this December.
Regina: This December. Then you’re gonna be free.
Gene: Yeah. One of the things I’m looking forward to most is I get to sit in on the meeting to choose the next ambassador. So I wanna see how that goes.
Regina: Yeah! That’s gonna be awesome!
Gene: That’ll be in like September I think. Somewhere around there. Yeah, I’m excited about that.
Regina: Wow, that is gonna be awesome. I will ask you this one last thing. If you could be a superhero — like if you could go to these cons and dress up as like a superhero or some character, who would you dress up as?
Gene: Would I have the powers or just the look?
Regina: Let’s do powers too.
Gene: If I also had the Powers —
Regina: Let’s do two: the powers and the look. Two different ones.
Gene: The powers, I would want to be Multiple Man. Do you know who that is?
Regina: Yeah.
Gene: Yeah, Jamie Madrox. I think it’s Jamie Madrox in the Marvel universe.
Regina: Yeah.
Gene: Yeah, he can make clones of himself and I always thought that was awesome. I would just try to fill the world with clones of me. That would be great.
Regina: Yeah I think I have asked you this. That is the one you — who would you dress up as?
Gene: I would dress up as Mr. Miracle.
Regina: Mr. Miracle? Who is Mr. Miracle?
Gene: He’s my favorite. He has my favorite suit. It’s like super goofy looking. It’s like red and green and yellow. He’s the world’s greatest escape artist. No, I’m sorry. The universe’s greatest escape artist in the DC universe. So, he came from a planet called Apocalypse and he escaped.
Regina: Alright. Okay.
Gene: Granny Goodness is like a little school.
Regina: This is all very familiar from like Justice League.
Gene: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He shows up in Justice League. I think there’s a — there’s a two or three episode arc about him.
Regina: Yeah. I’m gonna totally look this up.
Gene: Yeah, he’s my favorite.
Regina: Thank you so much for talking to me.
Gene: Oh, thank you Regina. It’s been great.
Regina: This has been awesome. I want to give you a hug when we stand up.
Gene: It’s always fun.
Regina: Aww, thank you so much. I’m gonna actually — I’m gonna sign off now. I don’t know how —
[Switches to audio of podcast.]
Regina: Yeah, no. I mean, he’s really cool.
Jeff: Your interview with him — he’s so nice.
Regina: Yeah, he’s crazy nice.
Jeff: He takes a genuine interest in you.
Regina: I know. [Laughing.] He’s like, “How are you doing?”
Jeff: He wants to listen.
Django: He interviewed you. He flipped it on you.
Regina: He flips it on me twice. The first time I interviewed him it was at Western Washington University and he was there for a literary conference. We’re talking and I had just read a ton of his stuff in the last 48 hours, so just all about Gene Yang in my head.
We start talking about drawing and he’s like — I talk about how I wanted to draw when I was a kid and I wanted to be an artist and I never did it. He’s like, “Why did you give up writing? Why did you give up drawing?” He’s like, “You shouldn’t give it up. Tell me about it.” I’m like, what? He totally turned it around and he was like my therapist.
Then I sent him — I did do a comic in grad school and we talked about it in the interview. I sent him the comic and he was like, “I love it.”
[Laughing.]
I thought it was just me. He’s just nice to me. You go to any of his interviews, he’s just the nicest dude.
Jeff: It shows.
Regina: I like to think he’s my best friend but I don’t think he is.
[Laughing.]
Jeff: We’ve met a lot of creators in comic books and that’s the kind of creator you want to meet. Like, somebody that’s not just filing you through a line. Somebody that is talking to you wants to talk to you.
Django: I’m not gonna name any names, but I was disappointed three or four times at the last Emerald City.
Regina: Are you serious?
Django: Oh yeah.
Jeff: Oh, creators can be very bullheaded.
Django: I mean, in that situation too, they’re just sitting there like grinding through people who want their autographs for eBay half the time. You know, it’s not as one-on-one. We’ve been really lucky with everybody we’ve talked to; I mean the one person we’ve talked to on this podcast. [Laughing.]
Regina: I do want to say, just to kind of continue the idea of how awesome and nice Gene is. He actually got back to me via email and I found him and I was a little late. We were walking out and he saw somebody dressed up as Aang like from Avatar: The Last Airbender. He’s like, “Oh, can I take a picture of you?” They didn’t know who he was. They’re like, “Yeah of course.” He took a picture of them. I was about to take a picture of him taking a picture of Aang and I just missed it. I was like, “Oh man I missed it.” He goes, “Oh, do you want me to go back?”
[Laughing.]
So he goes back and like I have a picture of it and it’s totally staged because he did it for me. Then he’s like, “Okay where do you want to talk?” I was like, “I have no idea. I don’t have a press pass here.” So we found like a deserted hallway. I have a picture of us in this hallway. We’re sitting on the floor in this tiny, narrow hallway. People are like walking past us. It was just super awkward and he was nice the entire time. He’s just a super nice guy.
Jeff: Well I hope that you can somehow use some pull to get him up here sometime because I would love to get him in the store. I would love to have him on a podcast here. I would really love to meet him. He exudes a type of goodness that I find very very inspiring.
Regina: If he shows up to Emerald City Comic Con next year, I saw Django there, so I’ll round you guys up and maybe we can find another hallway that’s bigger and interview him again.
Jeff: I found one quote from him that I just think is — it’s not even too much of a quote. He just describes comics. He says, “Comics are motivating, visual, permanent, intermediary, and popular.” I think that that awareness of what comics are shows through in both of these books. He’s not below comics writing a story. He’s aware of a medium and he’s utilizing that medium to sort of put his agenda out there. I think that there’s not enough creators using comic books in that way. I think that if you’re looking to be inspired by what a comic can do, he is a writer that I would absolutely point to as somebody who is being very forward thinking.
Regina: Yeah.
Jeff: He inspires me, just like Django.
Regina: That’s beautiful.
Django: No, I’m a villain. We talked about this.
[Laughing.]
Regina: I think that’s a good place to end. He was great.
Jeff: Thank you so much for reading [sp?] that interview. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. Thanks for letting us be on your show. Thank you for being on ours.
Regina: Yeah, thank you for being on my show.
Django: It’s like a flip book.
[Laughing.]
Regina: Yeah, first crossover, might have to do the intro one more time. Nah. [Laughing.]
Django: Or if you want to record one and send it to me, we can do that too.
Regina: Yeah, let’s do that.
Jeff: Yeah.
Regina: Yeah, thank you so much. This has been awesome. It’s forced me to get caught up on a lot of stuff.
Jeff: It’s so easy in comics to kind of just ride the waves and you encouraged me to do a thing that I had put on the backburner. Super, super glad that you did.
Regina: I’m very forceful.
[Laughing.]
Jeff: Oh I know. I play shorters [sp?] for you.
Django: Do we have like a late ’80s high five, like three people high fiving cartoon sound effect we can use?
Jeff: We could do a clap sound or we could just do like your Breakfast Club “Don’t You Forget About Me” altro.
Django: Oh, yeah.
Regina: No, isn’t there like the twins —
Jeff: The Wonder Twins?
Regina: Wonder Twins. [Makes buzzing sound.]
Jeff: Wonder twins activated!
Django: Surprise us Jeff.
Jeff: I’ll surprise you.
Regina: That should be our podcast crossover: The Wonder Twins.
Jeff: I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, well, I’m Jeff.
Django: I’m Django.
Regina: And I’m Regina.
Jeff: Thanks so much.
Regina: Yeah.
Django: Good bye!
[Wonder Twins show playing.]
Zan: We’ve got to stay awake Jayna.
Zan and Jayna: Wonder Twin powers activate [launching sound.]
[♪ Music playing ♪]
Jayna: Shape of Octopus.
Zan: Form of an ice unicycle. [Twinkling sound effect.] Come on, Jayna. It’s up to us to stop those aliens!
Regina: This is Spark Science and we’ll be back again next week. Listen to us on 102.3 FM in Bellingham or KMRE.org. Streaming on Sundays at 5pm, Thursdays at noon, and Saturdays at 3pm. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us an email or post a message on our Facebook page, Spark Science. This is an all-volunteer run show, so if you want to help us out, go to SparkScienceNow.com and click on donate. Our theme music is Chemical Calisthenics by Blackalicious and Wondaland by Janelle Monae.
[♪Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]
♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
♪ Iodine nitrate activate
♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients
♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop them
♪ And they hit the ground
[End podcast.]