The Color of Truth the daily happenings of a community activist

Sunday Book Club

Royal T in Culver City for a book club meeitng. Fancy schmancy tea hangout with waitresses dressed as maids (strange). I use to live a few blocks from here, but never even realized this place existed until Sunday.

This was my first book club meeting. The group, mostly USC students (I'm the only UCLA'er), reads and discusses Asian Am books every few months. This month was Secret Identities: Asian American Superhero Anthology. In this pic, you can see that one of the organizers of the book, Parry Shen, came to discuss the book with us. For those who don't remember, he's probably best known as the main character in Better Luck Tomorrow.

He showed us some of the original artwork. That was pretty interesting.

This comic actually got picked up by Marvel. It's called The Citizen. Based partially off of Ehren Watada. Kinda looks like him.

Overall, while I do appreciate the effort put in to making this anthology of Asian American superheroes, I just couldn't get in to it. I felt as though there was a blowhorn blaring the phrase "ASIAN AMERICAN IDENTITY!" all throughout the book. It was too much, and it felt so forced. I wish the writers could have been more creative and challenged the readers. You can cover Asian American identity in much more subtle ways.

Look, I get it. I can see how there is a need for these types of comics. We need superheroes who we can directly identify with. But I feel like if we really want to create some change in how comics are done, and to have more superheroes who are Asian American, you have to take a different approach.While there is a need for some Asian American superheroes, we also need to think about superheroes who are Asian American.

I brought up that there's this fine line you have to walk when creating people of color superheroes. If you make the person too focused on his/her racial/ethnic identity, it seems as if there is a diversity checklist that needs to be filled out, and this character is really just a tool for the comic book company to come off "diverse". On the other hand, if the comic book characters don't even acknowledge their background and identity, then how can our communities really relate?

It's a tough to find the perfect balance, but what many people agreed in the book club, is that the stories and the characters needed to be hashed out more. There were maybe 40 something stories in this anthology, and this left people with maybe 4-8 pages to work with. Not really enough to develop anything. Feel free to borrow my copy and tell me what you think.