From the time he could read and started loving books, Author and Illustrator Gene Luen Yang has kept an “awesome shelf” of books. As a kid, the shelf might have included non-fiction books, books about young adventurers and inventors, and comic books. As an adult, one author on his shelf writes about the tension between the East and West, which speaks to him particularly because of his Chinese-American heritage. A book he read in college, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics inspired him to pursue writing and illustrating graphic novels; he was convinced the medium of comics/graphic novels could carry any story he wanted to tell.
