by Gene Yang | Originally posted at GeneYang.com
All this week, Sonny and I are taking you behind the scenes of our new comic The Shadow Hero! Buy the digital first issue of The Shadow Hero on Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks, or B&N Nook for a mere $0.99!
Here are the previous posts, in case you missed them:
Secret Origin of The Shadow Hero Part 1
Secret Origin of The Shadow Hero Part 2
Here are the script, thumbnail sketches, and Sonny’s final art for page 3:
SCRIPT
THUMBNAIL SKETCHES
FINAL ART
Hank Chu, the protagonist of The Shadow Hero, barely shows up in the first issue. Instead, the focus is on his immigrant parents. I’m sure that breaks some sort of writing rule somewhere.
I recently read Save The Cat, so Blake Snyder’s writing advice has been swirling in my head. As I was writing, I debated the choice of keeping Hank in the background for so long. In the end, I stuck with it because I feel it mirrors the experience of the immigrant’s kid. So much of our life stories are determined before we were born. Often the “inciting incident” for a central tension in our lives — the tension between cultures — occurred before we took our first breath. Hope you’ll read the comic and let me know if you think the choice was a good one.
More tomorrow!
Gene Luen Yang’s first book with First Second, American Born Chinese, is now in print in over ten languages and was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Printz Award. Yang’s other works include the popular comics adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender and the New York Times Best-Selling graphic novel diptych Boxers & Saints. The Shadow Hero, the story of the first Asian American superhero is his most recent graphic novel.