I really enjoyed Amy Kurzweil’s interview with the comics artist Gene Luen Yang from the Fall 2023 Believer. (I read it in print but here it is online.) I loved the bits about the physical effects of being a cartoonist, plus I just loved Yang’s sensibility and sense of humor. Here’s a favorite exchange:
BLVR: What was the family dynamic? Did both you and your brother feel the pressure from your father to, like the Level Up character, become a doctor or something?
GLY: The Level Up character is loosely based on my brother. My brother is a doctor. He’s four years younger than me and he was always better at video games than me. He just had better hand-eye coordination. I remember him telling me all these crazy stories about the stuff he would have to do in med school, like dissecting human cadavers and labeling hemisected human heads. The way video games and medicine connected for me was him telling me that for one of his assignments, he had to do a colonoscopy on somebody. And after that, he decided to be a gastroenterologist. When he was a kid, he was super squeamish. So I was like, “You used to feel like throwing up when you saw dog poop on the street. Why would you want to be a gastroenterologist?” And he said, “Because a colonoscopy is like playing video games up somebody’s ass.”
BLVR: [Laughs]
GLY: I was like, “That’s a graphic novel.”
Gotta read it.
