But if you’re doing something new and different that maybe has never been done before within the medium, I think that would be a success as well. Success in terms of a piece of art, I think, is to make a comic that gets the reader to the last page. But you can have a book that doesn’t break even at all that’s still successful as a piece of art. I think that the easiest way of defining failure in terms of money is whether or not you break even. There’s the artistic level and the more practical level, and you can fail in one way without failing in the other. I think there are two levels on which failure operates. If you feel like you need to get a perfect first draft out, you will never take risks and you’ll never experiment. I’m a firm believer that you should feel as free as you want to be in that first draft-free to fall on your face. So you have to give yourself the freedom to do that. But you’ll never find out until you do it. And when you do that, inevitably, you’re going to hit failure because the reason why it’s never been pushed that way is because it’s a bad way to push it. There’s a certain definition of artistic success where you’re doing something that’s never been done before, or pushing a medium in a way that it’s never been pushed. In his own words, here’s Yang on how his definition of success has evolved over the years, and what Spiderman taught him about failure.

Yang, who had aspired to work in comics since grade school, also teaches creative writing at Hamline University. Yang was also a featured speaker at the 2014 National Book Festival Gala, where he spoke about how the fear of failure is a stumbling block to telling more diverse stories. Yang pushed through, however, and since then, has garnered a second National Book Award nomination for the two-volume Boxers & Saints (which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and developed the graphic novel iteration of Nickelodeon’s popular cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender, among other projects. He and his collaborator, Lark Pien, spent several years in rewrite mode after his editor broke the news that the nearly finished comic simply wasn’t good enough to publish. According to Yang, however, his next project was less successful. In 2006, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese became the first graphic novel to become a National Book Award finalist and to win the American Library Association’s Printz Award.

Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang