By Zack Quaintance — In Gene Luen Yang’s new graphic novel, Dragon Hoops (out now from publisher First Second), the writer/cartoonist makes two of the book’s foundational ideas clear from the start, from the first page and the very first panel. Said first panel features Yang’s likeness talking directly to the reader, telling them I’ve hated sports ever since I was a little kid. Especially basketball, and then we cut to young Yang trying to catch a pass and getting a handful of jammed fingers.

It’s a fantastic opener, and the first idea it establishes is that Yang himself is going to be a key part of this story. He’s going to be creator/character both, and it’s going to be his journey as much as anyone’s that gives this book its shape, trajectory, and structure. In other words, we are in for a metafictional good time. Think Scott McCloud’s seminal work, Understanding Comics and you’ll have a good sense of how Yang interacts in Dragon Hoops with the reader.

Second, this panel lets readers know right off that Yang is not a basketball fan, putting non-basketball fans at ease and letting them know that Yang gets it. Soothing this hesitancy on the part of the non-basketball fan is very important. This is a book that has “Hoops” in the name and a dimpled dust jacket meant to convey the texture of a basketball. There’s a very real risk of someone who doesn’t appreciate the game looking at that and thinking, “This book isn’t for me.” 

So, the first panel lets readers know Yang is with them, that he himself was where they are when he started the journey of the book’s creation. He doesn’t have to worry about losing actual basketball fans (myself included), because we were always going to read a book that has “Hoops” in the name and a dimpled dust jacket meant to convey the texture of a basketball. We’re easy. 

With that established, Yang is then free to go into the actual story, which is about the men’s basketball team at the Northern California high school where he teaches striving to finally win the state championship after years of coming close. The stories of the individual coaches and players involved are all part of the larger narrative mosaic of this, as is Yang’s own story, which involves him working on this book while also deciding whether he should accept DC Comics’ offer to go write Superman for the publisher.

I wanted to talk about that first panel and how effective it is, because it gets at the heart of Dragon Hoops’ greatest strength — this is a book that dismisses expectations and conventions in all the right places. This is an assured and confident book that has clearly had years of thought put into it. It’s not too on the nose, but it does get a great many things right. There are risks taken throughout, but at every turn they’re the right risk. The end result is a graphic novel that should have appeal for basically any reader, the rare sort of creative work that hones so closely and earnestly in on the specifics of a niche world, that it drills into nigh-universal themes. It is, in two words, very good.

That’s my 20,000 foot view of Dragon Hoops, which is the best comics thing I’ve come across so far in 2020. On a granular level, there is also a pile of small things this book does well too. There’s a hilarious running gag about the nicknames students and faculty have for Yang; there’s the deft and humanizing way he handles a complicated situation with one of the story’s key figures; there’s the uncanny knack throughout for picking the exact details to make every character relatable; and there’s the presence of the setting in Oakland that reminds us something about California we too often forget — that it’s in the vanguard of American cultural change. 

And, perhaps, more importantly than all of this — there’s the third act crescendo and finale, the single most difficult thing to achieve in all of creative storytelling. I, of course, don’t want to spoil it, so all I’ll say is that Yang sticks the narrative and emotional landing here so hard that even though I was 99 percent sure I knew how this story ended, the way it was executed still brought tears to my eyes.

Perhaps the most important theme in this entire book, however, is one about stepping into uncertain situations. It’s conveyed over and over throughout via a serious of detail shots of characters’ feet literally stepping into new schools, new countries, new positions. The central metaphor that supports this is basketball itself, which Yang contrasts brilliantly with his own beloved stories of superheroes. In superhero stories, we know the good guy always wins; in basketball, there’s nothing so simple as good or bad guys — and the outcome is uncertain. The ultimate question Yang asks with Dragon Hoops, is whether this isn’t a much closer metaphor for real life, rich as it is with shades of gray, nuance, and the uncertainty that backdrops all of our most pressing decisions? 

It’s a question that’s present in the surface story about a team trying to win a championship, and about his own decision to leave his dayjob teaching to write Superman (special note for superhero fans, there’s a phone conversation in here about a controversial moment in Yang’s Superman tenure where you can basically hear former DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio on the other end, even though he’s never named). It’s even present in the ways he chooses to tell this story, and I think that’s what at once makes this book exactly what we need right now — 435 pages that make us feel better about uncertainty while also providing an immersive and refreshing story of growth and acceptance.

Dragon Hoops
Writer/Artist: Gene Luen Yang
Colorist: Lark Pien
Art Assists By: Rianne Meyes and Kolbe Yang
Publisher: First Second
Release Date: March 11, 2020
Solicit: In his latest graphic novel, Gene Luen Yang turns the spotlight on his life, his family, and the high school where he teaches. Gene doesn't get sports. But at Bishop O'Dowd High School, it's all anyone can talk about. The men's varsity basketball team, the Dragons, is having a phenomenal season that's been decades in the making. Once Gene gets to know these young all-stars, he realizes that their story is just as thrilling as anything he's seen on a comic book page. What he doesn't know yet is that this season is not only going to change the Dragons' lives, but his own life as well.

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.