Before cartoonist Gene Luen Yang made history in 2006 with “American Born Chinese,” the first graphic novel ever to be nominated for a National Book Award, he was printing copies of its early chapters on his own and selling them by hand.

It’s a surreal image, seeing as the published book, a groundbreaking assessment of growing up as a Chinese American in the contemporary United States, propelled the Bay Area cartoonist to a global audience and a career that has since shadowed seemingly all territories of the comic world.

Yang, who is a husband, father of four and former teacher, has since received another National Book Award nomination (2013’s diptych of Chinese historical fiction, “Boxers & Saints”) and a MacArthur genius grant; and he is now the national ambassador for young people’s literature. In the past two years, he wrote 10 issues of DC Comics’ “Superman” series before helming the rebirth of the series, “New Super-Man,” in which a Chinese hero emerges as the latest Man of Steel. Yang’s latest book, “Robots & Repeats” (First Second; $10.99) — part of his comic series “Secret Coders,” which follows a group of young programmers fighting world domination — comes out Tuesday, Oct. 3.

Yang self-published his early works while teaching computer science at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland.

“Back then, you would finish drawing, and then you would take it to Kinko’s. You’d run off copies, like maybe 50 copies, and staple them by hand,” Yang says while sitting on a couch in Santa Clara’s Illusive Comics store, where his comics now line the shelves and Sharpie drawings of his characters decorate the wall.

In the mid- to late ’90s, Yang hadn’t seen a viable career as an illustrator, and instead became a computer programmer, then a teacher, after graduating from UC Berkeley. The comic book industry was threatened with collapse as Marvel Comics declared bankruptcy. “So I just thought, ‘Some people spend money on golf to relax. I will spend money on making comics,’” Yang says.

As a child, Yang read comics in secret, hiding from disapproving parents, sneaking out of the library with a friend to a nearby comic book store. “We’d check out these coffee-table size books that we could sneak our comics home in,” he recalls.

This was in the 1980s in the South Bay, where Yang was born and raised. Then, comics were widely dismissed as a serious form of literature, especially a genre that explored Chinese American identity, a theme Yang would help pioneer years later.

Early on, Yang and his family were among the few Asian Americans in Saratoga, where he grew up. But Yang was raised in what became a population transition for the area, which came to color his school experiences and eventually his voice as a writer.

“I think in the neighborhood that I grew up in, racial tensions were definitely there,” Yang says. “I do think something happens in any community when the majority becomes the minority — however you want to define those, it doesn’t necessarily have to be racial — these tensions come up.”

Much of this transition period, when “things were said in hallways” or “somebody would yell something stupid from a passing car,” became the basis of “American Born Chinese,” which combines three stories to reflect on internalized racism amid the formative years of finding one’s identity. The work was appropriately heralded as a breakthrough in comics, though Yang, up until 2006’s whirlwind of success, was a largely self-published writer who shared his stories with a group of cartoonist friends in the same position. Yang and the others were nevertheless using their comics, however unknown, as exercises in pushing the form.

“The idea was that we wanted comics to not just be about superheroes,” Yang says. “American comics up until that point had been limited to one genre, and we wanted to push it out of those genre boundaries.”

After writer Alan Moore (“Watchmen,” “V for Vendetta”), Yang and his friends would say — pretentiously he now admits — that there was nothing left to say in superhero comics. Ironically, while Yang has helped push graphic novels and comics toward a more mature and diverse art, he returned to its origins, becoming the writer for “Superman,” the first comic he ever read.

Yet Yang continues to challenge the form, especially with the Chinese hero of “New Super-Man” — an “oxymoron,” perhaps, that Yang has had to creatively wrangle as it situates the quintessentially American genre and hero within a Chinese setting.

Outside of his prolific writing projects, Yang somehow finds time for his role as the national ambassador for young people’s literature (his two-year term ends in December). His “Reading Without Walls” campaign, which includes a video podcast with guest authors, promotes diversified reading habits amongchildren and teens.

It’s an appropriate — and he says urgent — position for Yang; he quit teaching only after “Superman” came calling and his work often contains an educational thread. Lessons in identity and finding one’s place in the world often arise in his stories of myth, history, religion or even computer programming through his “Secret Coders” series, which teaches kids to code.

This is common thematic ground in young adult literature, Yang says, but no less pertinent for anyone who reads.

“I think the reasons adults these days read a lot of young adult fiction is that our world is changing so much so quickly that we constantly feel lost,” Yang says. “We constantly feel like we have to re-find our place. And I think that’s why I keep going back to it. I have to continuously find my place again.”

Brandon Yu is a Bay Area freelance writer.