Early Life
Gene Ha was born in Chicago, but was raised in South Bend, Indiana. Although he says his parents were well-educated Korean immigrants who hoped their three sons would get prestigious degrees and move on to corresponding careers, Ha, the most introverted of his parents' three sons (and the only one of the three not to play high school football), was a "geek", and sought out escapist fantasy, particularly through comic books. Although he says his two brothers were more artistically talented than he, they lacked the patience to sit for hours on end working on drawing. Ha sees parallels between his generation of Asian-American comics artists and the generation of Jewish creators from the 1930s, both of whom were children of immigrants struggling to fit into America.
Ha cites as his influences numerous creators from the 1980s, such as John Byrne, Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, Walter Simonson, Alan Moore and most importantly Matt Wagner, whose Mage series Ha says is still "magical" to him, and its main characters "personal archetypes".
Ha took few classes in art, as he was only interested in drawing as a means of creating comics, and South Bend offered little in the way of education in realistic drawing. He began to truly understand graphic arts when working on his high school newspaper, The Clay Colonial, winning the Most Valuable Staffer Award, which was unusual for an artist. After high school, Ha attended the College for Creative Studies. In his last semester he sent drawing samples to Marvel and DC. Though he received a harshly critical response from Marvel, DC was interested, and sent him a sample script.
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