On its surface, Gene Luen Yang’s “Dragon Hoops” (First Second) tells a basketball story. An ensemble story about a team of high school ballers, the Oakland Bishop O’Dowd Dragons, their coach Lou Richie, the players’ intriguing and diverse backgrounds, and their road through a momentous 2015 campaign for the California State Championships in men’s hoops. Sprinkled in are some histories of the sport, informed cultural commentary, and some behind-the-scenes glimpses into creator Gene Yang’s personal and ethical choices while chronicling “Dragon Hoops.” Blended in subtle doses, it all makes for compelling reading.
What makes “Dragon Hoops” a rare achievement, and one of the year’s most significant comics by my lights, is that Yang has again found a way to tell a story that is compelling and attentive to its subject, while threading the needle of humble representation to exemplify how stories like this can be meaningfully told in these times. “Dragon Hoops” is the O’Dowd Dragons’ story, but theirs is not one story, but many. And for that matter, as a journalistic documentation of living people in Yang’s immediate world, whatever the book’s limitations and oversights, underneath it all, it’s Yang’s story. He places on himself, as creator, the onus of storytelling as much as the privilege of being the storyteller.
Written and Illustrated by Gene Luen Yang
In his latest graphic novel, Dragon Hoops, New York Times bestselling author Gene Luen Yang turns the spotlight on his life, his family, and the high school where he teaches.
That compelling subject, that powerful central story, is the Dragons’ 2015 season, which Yang first introduces through his funny repartee with O’Dowd’s Coach Lou Richie, onetime lead guard and now longtime coach of varsity men’s basketball. Coach Lou leads a squad that includes future Pac-12 standouts Ivan Rabb and Paris Austin, along with a cast of players with a fascinating array of backgrounds, to vie for a state championship that BOD had been on the cusp of winning for years (0-6 in Richie’s player and coach careers). While the story’s spine is the team’s season and road to a potential title, Yang takes excursions into the players’ lives— an All-American destined to star at Cal, a Sikh student making his way in a Catholic school, a brother-sister duo of hoop stars— and into connected phenomena, like the women’s game, basketball’s rise in China, and Yang’s own decision to leave part-time teaching for full-time comics and family. The book’s trustiest device is placing Mr. Yang himself as a character, interviewing talkative or shy players, attending rowdy games, and making fateful decisions about whose stories to tell and how.
Therefore, insomuch as “Dragon Hoops” is about Bishop O’Dowd’s Coach Lou Richie, or about stars Rabb or Austin, or complementary players Jeevin Sandhu or Arinze (and superstar sister Oderah) Chidom, the story is also very much about Yang himself, making comics reportage that is both fun and ethically fastidious. The autobiographical part, which frames “Dragon Hoops” from beginning to end and throughout the telling, comes from the fact that “Mr. Yangsta” was a computer science teacher at Bishop O’Dowd during its historic men’s basketball run. Since then, in the intervening five years, Yang has been National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, MacArthur Genius, and still creator of landmark comics like “Secret Coders.”
But all the while, between advocating for diversity in literature and penning comics that confront white supremacy (“Superman Smashes the Klan”), Yang found a way— through no small amount of his own internal wrestling, as made visible in “Dragon Hoops” in discussions with his wife— to make an absorbing sports comic that also manages to touch on basketball’s race and gender histories, Black Lives Matter, specters of Catholic abuse scandals, and the discrimination still present even in diverse, progressive places like the Bay Area.
Already an award-winning graphic novelist for “American Born Chinese” and “Boxers & Saints,” Yang was still firmly part of Bishop O’Dowd’s teaching staff, albeit usually remote from its athletics hype. (And not necessarily because of any Computer Science stereotypes; mostly because of Yang’s own basketball clumsiness, which he humorously clues us in to early). As if by providence, Yang uncovered a fascinating sports story in his own back yard when Coach Lou regales him with tales of his own near-miss as a BOD player in the old days, and gives him the thrilling tape of the game to back it up.
Continued belowBy self-admission, Yang is no lifetime basketball junkie. But along with the very local excitement at Bishop O’Dowd for its basketball teams, “Dragon Hoops” takes shape in its creator’s imagination around the time of Linsanity and the rise of Steph Curry’s Golden State Warriors. I can claim no objectivity about how exciting this might be for those outside of the Venn diagram of basketball fans and comics nerds. But if you are right at that intersection like I am, your inner hoops geek will thoroughly enjoy the cameos from Ben Simmons, Brian Shaw, Yao Ming (and Chuck kissing a donkey), and The Town’s finest (J-Kidd, GP, and Dame), while savvy comics readers will spot the appearances from Thien Pham, maybe Dan Didio on the phone with Yang’s agent, and the Spider-Man paraphernalia littering Yang’s life. (And if all that sounds way too specific, I also must ‘fess up to my non-objective excitement that the schools where I teach show up as opponents crushed on BOD’s march to the championships.)
However, don’t mistake this affinity-geeking for the idea that you’ll only love “Dragon Hoops” if its subject-matter appeals to you. Here’s where Yang’s work stands out: his presence as a basketball neophyte, as a first-time comics journalist of sorts, and as a creator openly negotiating his own hard decisions—at one point, Yang portrays himself literally speaking to himself as his own conscience— makes this an intensely interesting book. For any reader interested in how we might tell stories once we decide to make very personal and maybe esoteric topics universally enjoyable, once we commit to honest representation of real stories and people, once we refuse blindness to hard histories, once we reimagine authorship as a more transparent and less colonizing act, Yang offers us a model.
To me, that humble representation has to be very local and particular to Yang’s experience and surroundings because it requires being embedded, with such personal stakes, in the communities about which you write and draw. Throughout the book, Yang (the writer avatar, as opposed to the “Avatar” writer!) is vexed by dividing his time between teaching, following the Dragons’ story as a cartoonist, and remaining present as a husband and father of enough kids to play family 3-on-3. In fact, he portrays that conflictual division of himself as a literal pie chart. Part of “Dragon Hoops” narrates how he comes to terms with leaving his teaching position after fifteen years, though Yang has no doubt remained in teaching roles.
Granted that important journey, I would also argue that it is his embeddedness at the school which gives “Dragon Hoops” its heart and its uniqueness, its way out of the challenges of representation and storytelling. Is it unfair to profit from the stories of unpaid youth athletes, the NCAA’s continual quandary? Or exploitative to dig into the backgrounds and struggles of real, living young adult students? Or irresponsible to either tell, or NOT tell, the controversial, murky story of former BOD Coach Mike Phelps? Yang does not evade those questions, but owns them and puts them into his own struggle as an author on the page. But how else do you burnish the gold, the beauty and wonder, of these remarkable young people’s stories, if you don’t shoulder the burden of those questions on yourself? You shine the light these kids deserve, and you don’t skirt the difficulties therein, by taking them on yourself in authorial truthfulness. Inevitably, though, the story becomes your own story as well. (Non-spoiler: the epilogue’s title is “Gene.”)
That’s the needle Yang threads. Much like his seminal “American Born Chinese,” or his clever “Shadow Hero” with Sonny Liew, or his wisely duologistic “Boxers & Saints,” or his refreshing “Superman Smashes the Klan” with Gurihiru. Contradictions can live side by side. Because they live in his personal selfhood, brought disarmingly, with self-effacing sarcasm and reverential sincerity, to render the human beings around him.
Speaking of his rendering, Yang’s art is also a master class in comics legibility. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, I would note that Yang’s one of my favorite artists, and though I never made this connection before, the artist he most reminds me of in “Dragon Hoops” is Scott McCloud. McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” series obviously set the benchmark for deceptively intelligent, neuro-conversant, philosophically-rooted comics legibility that was cunningly aware of itself. Yang has scrupulously utilized the simple line work, perfectly paced silent panels and balloon densities, angles of motion and speed lines and sound effects for sports action, and minimal uncrowded cartooning to let the art cleanly convey and cleverly get out of the way of his story. Lark Pien’s colors similarly serve the story’s clarity well.
The Dragons repeat a mantra, “Fewest mistakes wins,” which sounds way less inspiring than the Warriors’ “Strength in Numbers” or the Miami Heat’s “Fifteen Strong,” though all three are goofily mathematical. But every hoopshead knows the significance of elegant basketball without unforced errors, the way a team in sync makes it look easy. Throughout “Dragon Hoops,” Cartoon Gene Yang worries about being there for his family, leaving his teaching career, and so much else. But we see him worrying the most about the book itself: how the story will unfold if the season is a bust, which characters might end up villains that he didn’t intend for at the outset, how will the relative silence of important players come off?
To offer real praise that’s not likely to get quoted on a book jacket, this book makes few mistakes. In not doing wrong by the people whose stories he tells, Gene Yang offers the gift of his craft to the young people he draws and the school he belonged to for so long: a story that many readers will revel in. There’s something utterly and wonderfully unique about that.
