Eisner Award winning writer and artist Gene Luen Yang spoke with Hypable about his work on the Avatar: The Last Airbender comics series, and teased what’s to come in future installments.
Interview with Gene Luen Yang
You’re obviously a big fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender. What are your thoughts on The Legend of Korra, now that it’s all complete?
I’m only a fan, I’m not connected [professionally] at all. [But] Korra did give me something to write to — a goal to write to as I’m working on the Airbender comics. I think they did an amazing job. I think it’s awesome.
My favorite of all the seasons is definitely season 3 — I think the antagonists that they came up with were just incredibly compelling.
Was there an element of The Legend of Korra that you particularly enjoyed?
The thing that I actually find most interesting about Korra in general is its relationship to the old world. [Korra] showed how a small group of people in the world — the airbenders — can actually have these massive changes.
Related: The Legend of Korra comic series announced at San Diego Comic-Con panel
One of the things that I thought was the most awesome when I first entered into the world of Korra, was that there were all these crazy statues [of Avatar characters] all over, and how small concepts like chi-blocking — those very small, character-specific things in the original show — became these huge things in the new show. It kind of points to a truth; I think that happens in the real world too. These small groups of people create these massive changes.
Your Avatar comics also deal heavily with the relationship between the past and the future. Was that theme something you specifically wanted to explore?
I think it’s something that is evident in both series, especially in Korra, this tension between the past and the future. It’s also something that I just feel in my own life. I often feel — and maybe it’s just from being a nerd! But I often feel torn between the future and nostalgia. Superhero fans, so much of superheroes looks to the future, but so much of the passion for superheroes comes from the past, so there’s always that tension there.
What has it been like to explore family relationships — like Zuko and his mother, and Toph and her father — that fans didn’t get to see on Avatar: The Last Airbender?
When you’re working in a licensed property, in a pre-existing world set up by someone else, [you really have to juggle that] with your own writer’s voice. So for me, family definitely fits into that. Family fascinates me — it’s something that I have dealt with in my own writing, and it’s also a really important part of the Avatar world.
I think Mike and Bryan very intentionally set it up so that each of the principal characters has a very different kind of family. Aang has lost his family. Zuko comes from a completely dysfunctional family. Sokka and Katara come from this really loving family that had to deal with tragedy, and then Toph comes from a family where everything is kind of stilted and cold. So just in that, you kind of get a gamut of what it means for us to be family, and that’s something we wanted to explore.
As a writer, how do you view those unexplored areas of the story?
I think one of the things that the show does really well is show how often things just don’t get resolved completely. And I think that was some of the point of leaving the dangling threads [at the end of Avatar] — they treat this like life, and that’s something I had in mind as I was writing Toph.
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