The San Francisco Chronicle looks at three recent graphic novels and sees a potential movement:
When I first read “American Born Chinese,” the graphic novel by Bay Area artist and writer Gene Yang, I told friends that it was the best work of Asian American literature I’d read in a long time. Rereading it led me to amend that statement: It was, I subsequently declared, one of the best Asian American novels I’d ever read, period. Now that the book has won a sheaf of the most prestigious awards in publishing, I just keep my trap shut and give the book as a gift to the not-yet-enlightened: A dozen copies to date, and counting.
With the publication of two new graphic novels, “Shortcomings” by Adrian Tomine and “Good as Lily” by Derek Kirk Kim, my holiday shopping list just grew a little bit longer… Both artists are Asian American, male, of approximately the same age, and similarly rooted in the Bay Area — Kim grew up in Pacifica and graduated from the [San Francisco] Academy of Art; Tomine was born in Sacramento and went to UC Berkeley — so perhaps it isn’t a stretch to compare the two; but their latest works do more to illustrate their contrasts than their commonalities.
…”I don’t think any of us set out to create ‘Asian American literature,’ and maybe that’s why the work being done in comics is so interesting,” says Kim. “None of us had any noble goals, or commercial ones. None of us even had expectations that anyone would read our stuff. So we never had that pressure of ‘representing’ our community.” But that’s precisely why their stuff does, and so well. Unhampered by the need to be by, for, or about, they simply hold a true glass up to Asian America’s morning face; and despite bed-head and stubble, it’s beautiful to see.
