Book Review: Dragon Hoops by G. L. Yang et al.

Dragon Hoops written and drawn by Gene Luen Yang and colored by Lark Pien

In this autobiographical graphic novel, Gene Luen Yang describes the Bishop O'Dowd High School basketball team's season trying to win the California state championship. Yang was not a player or even the father of a player. He was not the coach or even on the coaching team. He was not a basketball fan or even a sports fan. He taught computer science for seventeen years and worked in his spare time as a graphic novelist (nights and weekends are reserved for family). In 2014, he heard a lot of buzz on campus about the basketball team. Yang was in a writing lull and looking for a new story to tell. A story about basketball would be a challenge. Yang started interviewing the coaches and players at O'Dowd as well as researching the history of basketball. He even started going to the games.

At this time, he started negotiating with DC Comics, who wanted him to write Superman. Such a project would be a dream come true but also a lot of work and pressure. That would be in addition to the extra work one the basketball book. In a pie chart, Yang shows his life balance and the new threat.

Yay balance!

Hmmm...

The additional burden of following the team (who played a lot of games out of town, sometimes across the country) forced him into making hard decisions about his own life and ambitions. As he found out more about the student athletes, he found inspiration in his own life.

The book is an amazing blend of history, current events, and personal journey. Yang moves between the narratives effortlessly, keeping the reader engaged and informed. A big challenge in depicting sports is the comics format, which forces a static representation of an action-packed game. He does a good job conveying the excitement, even leaving one page as a cliffhanger with the resolution requiring the turning of a page. He also does a great job using callback images, like the times when various characters have the courage to move forward, this is depicted with a closeup of their foot stepping forward. The other great callback is a group of scientists/experts who give wrong "informed" opinions for why women can't play basketball or minorities are inferior. And even the pie chart keeps showing up. His own journey to commit fully to comics writing is paralleled with the students' ambitions for their own lives and the team's hope to finally win the state championship.

Highly recommended--this is the best stand-alone graphic novel I have read in fifteen years of reading graphic novels.