May/June 2023 Edition of Devin's Chicago Comics Book Club Digest
They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker
Happy AAPI Heritage Month, everyone! We had a good turnout last week, with one new person and more than one person we haven’t seen in a bit. The discussion stayed on topic longer than usual for us, too. We all learned a lot about American history and I learned that I should definitely order food if I’m gonna have more than one “Gracie O’Fashioned.” Lol
Hardly any of us remembered learning anything in school about this ugly chapter of American history. I had read Farewell to Manzanar in an English class in ninth grade, but that was about it. More than once, we wished a historian could have been present at the table to provide more context, especially about any congressional resistance to Executive Order 9066. Comparisons were made to past readings, including Maus and Palestine. The artwork was found to be serviceable, but it worked with the child’s perspective most of the book was trying to capture. There won’t be a book to discuss for June. Instead, I’ll be moderating a special panel discussion of LGBTQ+ comic creators sponsored by the Chicago Public Library for Pride Month. Please join us if you can at the Logan Square Chicago Public Library branch on Tuesday, June 20 at 6:30 pm CST!
What We're Reading
June 20 - Special Pride Month Comics Panel
July 19 - The Backstagers, Volume 1: Rebels Without Applause by James Tynion IV and Rian Sygh
August 16 - The Good Asian, Volume 1 by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alex Tefenkgi
September 20 - Heartstopper, Volume 1 by Alice Oseman
October 18 - Harrow County, Volume 1: Countless Haints by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook
November 15 - Unnamed Marvel Book
December 20 - The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack by Nicholas Gurewitch
January 17 - Always Never by Jordi Lafebre
You can learn more about the special Pride Month panel discussion here. The panelists will be Kat Leyh, Pamela Nuñez-Trejo, and Whitney Wasson. Please check out their work and I hope to see you there if you can make it!
Shameless Self-Promotion
I’ve submitted to yet another anthology! This is another one-page story, so I may commission it from the artist if it doesn’t get accepted, similar to my other one-page comic project. I’ve gotten more updated pencils and have been in touch with the colorist for that piece. I’m looking forward to sharing a finished comic with you all here soon!
I’m still scripting two different 22-page one-shot comics. I got the character designs back for one and I’m very excited to develop that project further, though I’m struggling to come up with a title, of all things. Lol I’m also planning to submit to the Mad Cave Studios 2023 Talent Search.
NEWS
They Called Us Enemy won the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Young Adult Literature, and the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. The teacher’s guide can be found here. The TED talk George Takei gave that opened the comic, “Why I love a country that once betrayed me,” can be seen here. A documentary about his life, To Be Takei, was made in 2014. The title came from a PSA he made in 2011 about a Tennessee “Don’t Say Gay” bill. On a (sort of) lighter note, here’s a Drunk History clip featuring Randall Park about Frank Emi, who formed the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee to protest the drafting of Japanese Americans during their internment. Finally, here’s a recent blog post from Maggie Tokuda-Hall about an infuriating email she got from Scholastic about her own nonfiction book about this topic, Love in the Library.
Eagle-eyed readers (who inexplicably read last month’s newsletter twice, I guess) may have noticed that the phrase “legendary artist John Byrne” was altered to “famous Superman and X-Men illustrator John Byrne (who sucks).” That’s because after writing and posting the newsletter, I learned that John Byrne has compared trans people to pedophiles and that there’s a whole “Controversies” tab on his Wikipedia page. It was especially disheartening to learn that his anti-immigrant views informed his Superman work. I know I take a hardline stance on stuff like this, which often gets interpreted as judgment against those who don’t, but I believe every individual has to create their own personal standards based on their own conscience. I’m the one writing this, though. Fuck John Byrne.
Whoopi Goldberg has written a graphic novel that will be released by Dark Horse on November 28, The Change. I wasn’t planning on mentioning this, because “celebrity writes comic” is hardly news, but then a YouTube channel I’d already blocked showed up in my recommendations calling this a “self-insert vanity project.” If racist, misogynistic trolls are going to try to tank The Change, I want to do my part to drown them out.
CAKE is finally back! The Chicago Alternative Comics Expo has been on hiatus since the start of Covid, but it’s finally returning on June 3rd and 4th and I couldn’t be more excited. It’s at a new venue and I’m hoping to get a lot of networking in and see lots of old friends.
Of course, the biggest entertainment news this month has been the Writers Guild of America voting to strike.
wrote about the coverage of it here. If you think this has nothing to do with comics, think again. Here’s a breakdown of the many ways it does, from comic writers standing in solidarity and having to delay film and tv projects to some writers being wary of spec scripts being turned into comics. Personally, I stand with the WGA.One of the chief concerns of the WGA is the use of AI. Artist and activist Mary Crabapple has created and circulated an open letter through the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting calling for the restriction of AI illustration. It had more than 3,000 signatures from all over the world last time I checked, including from such comics figures as Tim Seeley and C. Spike Trotman. Feel free to sign it and circulate it yourself!
The first Saturday of May is also known as Free Comic Book Day, an event about which I have mixed feelings. A nuanced examination of it was recently published by SKTCHD that I highly recommend.
Also in SKTCHD, David Harper published a look at comics culture in France that is definitely worth a read. Also on the topic of international comics, The New Yorker published a profile of Argentine comic creator Héctor Germán Oesterheld that is fascinating for its intersection of art and history.
Finally, SOLRAD published this article by Kim Jooha: “Post-Internet Toronto: Towards Critical Histor(ograph)y of Independent Comics & The Dialectics of Technology and Visual Culture in Post-Internet Comics.” Its as dense and academic as its title suggests, but worth it. It also may reignite any thoughts about moving to Canada you entertained in the last few years.
Some Thoughts on Presidents
My grandmother was born in 1920. The Great Depression was a formative experience for her and she spoke of the man she credited with ending it, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in glowing terms for the rest of her life. The fact that he also was responsible for people being herded into concentration camps without due process, having their belongings confiscated, and held against their will based solely on their ethnicity would not have changed her mind.
On the opposite end of the political spectrum, I have heard (white) leftists speak of FDR as their favorite president and even hand wave away the internment of Japanese people as if that were counterbalanced by “defeating the Nazis” and a progressive agenda. That FDR’s progressive agenda excluded Black and brown people is usually reserved for another conversation, if at all.
The topic of “favorite presidents” is very much a privileged one. I remember a conversation I had with two roommates about it not too long ago. One of them chose Taft because of his distinction as having been President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; the other chose Theodore Roosevelt for his work in conservation. I was working as a freelance editor of history textbooks at the time and had just read Woodrow Wilson’s “Peace without Victory” speech that afternoon, so I tentatively chose him.
The whole thing was a less funny, less self-aware version of this bit from Seinfeld:
George: “Magellan? You like Magellan?”
Jerry: “Oh, yeah, my favorite explorer. Around the world, come on! Who do you like?”
George: “I like de Soto.”
Jerry: “De Soto? What did he do?”
George: “He discovered the Mississippi!”
Jerry: “Oh, yeah, like they wouldn’t have found that anyway!”
If that had been a conversation between anyone other than two white guys, somebody might have been able to explain that both Magellan and de Soto were bloodthirsty maniacs who decimated several indigenous populations. Also, it’s impossible to “discover” a place where people already live. Similarly, anyone might have explained to my roommates and me that Taft didn’t have a great track record on women’s rights and believed world peace could be achieved through what today would be considered “soft imperialism,” Teddy Roosevelt was a stronger believer in imperialism, and Wilson was regressively racist even for 1918 and had regular screenings of propaganda for the Ku Klux Klan at the White House (this was not mentioned in the history book I had been editing).
Thankfully, I had my bubble burst pretty quickly. That evening, while waiting tables at my night job (freelance editing didn’t cover all my bills), I asked a Black coworker, “Who is your favorite president?”
She justifiably glared at me for a few seconds before patiently explaining to me that her only real options were Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama, and neither of them were exactly perfect choices. I had to admit she had a point. What I had thought was a fun icebreaker, I now realized was an invitation to glamorize individuals who were problematic at best and outright evil at worst.
Much like my stance on John Byrne from a few paragraphs ago, I think it’s up to each person to decide who they want to glamorize and why. There’s a lot of bad-faith conservative hand wringing lately about “erasing” George Washington or Thomas Jefferson from history, but nobody’s advocating for that. Not really. Whether it’s “the guy who created Shadowcat” or “the father of our country,” a more holistic approach to their legacies allows for more nuance (not that I’m saying these are equivalent accomplishments). Plus, that’ll allow us to acknowledge when a president is absolutely terrible, like Andrew Jackson or Trump.
Ronald Reagan, one of the most notoriously racist presidents of modern history, provided reparations for Japanese Americans. We joked at our meeting that the big takeaway from They Called Us Enemy was “FDR bad, Reagan good.” It was funny because it was exactly the kind of oversimplification that should be avoided (also because it was patently untrue even on that sliding scale). Every comic is somebody’s first, and every president has his fans (shout out to the Warren G. Harding defenders and Franklin Pierce enthusiasts out there!). People are complicated and so are geopolitics. Who needs a favorite president anyway? Happy Memorial Day weekend!
I ended in a very different place from where I started this month, but I wanted to make sure I got this posted on time. Hope this essay wasn’t too scattershot. Feel free to share any thoughts or comments below! Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks for reading. See you in a month for our special Pride Month Comic Creators Panel!