Retro Golden Age: The Shadow Hero

Gene Luen Yang has made a career out of exploring issues related to racial identity, personal beliefs and the relationship between the two and the importance of family. The themes surrounding his first major book, American Born Chinese (shame, identity and connection as an Asian-American) may not dominate any particular work, but they're always there in one form or another. Yang has always had two major flaws as a cartoonist: his treatment of these issues is often too didactic and on-the-nose; his art style is far too slick and slightly bland to sustain my interest as a reader. As he's continued to explore variations on these themes, his storytelling has subtly begun to shift in ways that improve the reading experience. His epic Boxers/Saints finally and openly grappled with issues of faith in a way that he had only hinted at in earlier works, and while it firmly came down on the side of his own Christian faith, he allowed for a surprising amount of ambiguity and criticism of the way Catholicism was spread in China.

In his newest and most lighthearted book to date, The Shadow Hero, Yang further buries the more polemical qualities of his ideas in an action comedy romp. The background of why he chose to do this book is almost as interesting as the book itself. Yang learned of a Golden Age cartoonist named Chu Hing, the first Asian-American cartoonist. He created a superhero in 1944 named The Green Turtle, who appeared in the pages of Blazing Comics for just a few issues. A bare-chested hero who mysteriously never showed his face, Yang theorized that Hing wanted to make his hero explicitly Asian (or Asian-American) but wasn't allowed. So the theory goes that Hing deliberately kept his face hidden so as to allow the reader to make up their own mind.

As a storyteller, what Yang excels at most is structural problem-solving. He almost always throws in a plot-related knuckleball to keep the reader off-balance, and structures his plot around those game-changing story tentpoles. As such, The Shadow Hero is Yang's master class at plot structure, pacing, managing sub-plots and the use of broad characterizations to act as plot movers. Yang chose to fill in the many missing elements of the Green Turtle's origin and background and in so reverse-engineering the story, found ways to create a funny, compelling and exciting adventure. All of Yang's themes are still intact, just buried somewhat underneath the comedic and visceral elements of the story. At its heart, The Shadow Hero is all about the experience of Asian-American immigrants (the story takes place in the 1930s), as both the heroic Hank (later the Jade Tortoise) and the villainous Ten Grand both turned out to be the manifestations of animals spirit gods that had protected China for centuries. Yang is able to reference the casual racism towards Asians of the day, including from a putatively-heroic character, and then let it drop as he gets back to the story.

Yang isn't afraid to go broad in this story. Hank goes from being kind of a nebbish to a tough, capable hero who even manages to acquire a super-power. That said, he's a straightforward character compared to his mother, Hua, whose vacillation between shame and excitement is portrayed with great affection, especially because of the ways in which coming to America broke her spirit. Yang channels a bit of Derek Kirk Kim in the exaggerated way he writes her, especially once she gets it in her head to turn her son into a superhero. Throw in Hank's eventual fighting mentor Uncle Wun Too, villains like Mock Beak and the three beautiful but deadly daughters of Ten Grand, and one finds Yang dipping into outsized Asian character types while gently mocking them. Indeed, Yang is careful to give us the interior lives of the people behind the characters, so to speak, a view not seen in traditional Western appropriations and grotesque attempts at making Asians solely monstrous or objects of laughter. A good example is when Mock Beak thinks he's being attacked by a Caucasian super-hero, he uses the sort of pidgin English vernacular in order to try to convince his assailant that he's a simple and obedient immigrant. When he realizes that the Green Turtle is the son of a man he killed, he coldly reverts back to his true self. It's the kind of simple but effective scene that underlines Yang's commentary without taking over the narrative.

A major part of the book's success is the work of artist Sonny Liew. A veteran of many quasi-mainstream projects, his light touch and sketchy line were built for farcical action stories such as this. When he needs to get "loud" on the page and depict action and movement in an exciting manner, he's up to the challenge. When he needs to draw scenes exaggerated for comedic effect (like when Hua tries to give her son superpowers by dunking him in toxic chemicals and other hazardous methods), he takes great delight in adding all sorts of eye pops that make the scenes laugh-out-loud funny. When he needs to get romantic or quiet, Liew reins it in appropriately. The story is still very much structured like a Yang story, but it's clear that he gave Liew a great deal of leeway in just how to get across the action and humor. The supplemental material that Yang includes, including a Green Turtle story, is fascinating both in terms of revealing his inspirations as well as the elements Yang had to reverse-engineer in order to make his story work. Having that kind of pre-programmed structure seemed to greatly benefit him as a storyteller, and the result is perhaps his best all-around work to date. This is a story with a lot of layers disguised as an enjoyable goof, and that seems to be precisely Yang's speed.

God and Country: Boxers/Saints

Faith has always been in the background of Gene Luen Yang's comics. Identity, especially racial identity, was at the forefront of his breakout book American Born Chinese, but even in that book there were references to Christianity. In his new Boxers/Saints, Yang at last tackles faith as the primary subject of his comic while also addressing his usual questions of identity along with examining gender, love, nationalism and patriotism. Boxers and Saints are separate books that intersect at key points that take a fictionalized look at a real-life event: the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 in China. The crux of the event was that at a time of famine and drought, there was a wave of foreign missionaries sweeping China as well as opportunists working in their name who were essentially nothing more than bandits. The Chinese government was in a weakened state and did little to stop the wave of foreigners from essentially plundering their country and spreading a foreign faith. Yang actually sticks pretty close to the facts in telling the story of Bao, a young man who learns kung-fu from a member of a secret society that opposed bandits and protected villages. From his point of view, the government was ineffective, the foreign Christians were devils and it was time to stop them. He took up and spread the secret society and later renamed the group "Boxers" (Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists).

Yang brings to life the Boxers' belief that through a specific ritual, they would be possessed by gods and warriors from the past. It doesn't take long for Yang to establish Bao as an unreliable protagonist and eventually a tragic one. Bao is fighting a war but is uneasy with killing innocents, for example. Yang takes a while to reveal the identity of the spirit who possesses Bao and speaks to him in his dreams: Ch'in Shih-huang, the first emperor of China. This is the man who united, through bloody conflict, the seven kingdoms of China into one nation and built the Great Wall. As the book unfolds, just what the former emperor was willing to do to achieve his goal of unity becomes more and more unpleasant, as he even had to arrange to have his father killed. The narrative push-and-pull of Boxers is just what Bao is willing to do for China. When he spares a train full of Christian children and women, Ch'in tells him that he made a mistake. He would turn out to be right, as Bao's brother was later shot and killed by one of those girls. Bao not only has to steel himself against his natural inclination toward mercy and the noble edicts of his society, he also has to overcome his love for a fellow rebel who is a powerful warrior in her own right. His inability to definitively choose one or the other winds up dooming his movement and his love.

Yang is quite open about being a devoted Catholic but doesn't flinch in depicting the violence and corruption inflicted in the name of the cross in China. Bao has to betray promises, family and his core beliefs more than once but can't go all the way to do what the Emperor wished of him. Even when it seemed like he was ready to cross a line, he still was ready to backtrack and run away with his love at the last second, until he betrayed her as well. By trying to please everyone and failing to stick to his beliefs, he failed. Yang clearly has sympathy for Bao and wants the reader to sympathize with him as well, but it's clear that he's not meant to be an admirable figure. It's also clear that Yang is a humanist in the sense that he values compassion, love and family over more abstract and reified concepts like patriotism.

If Bao is a protagonist generally well-liked and respected for much of the book until he ultimately fails, then Four (later Vibiana) is precisely the opposite sort of character. She's the protagonist of Saints, which essentially looks at the rebellion from the point of view of a Chinese national who had converted to Christianity. Considered to be "secondary devils", they were slaughtered alongside forgeigners by the Boxers. Considered to be bad luck, she was given no name but "Four" or "Four Girl", and four apparently is equated with death. She spent her childhood as an outcast and even called a devil but the grandfather she so desperately wanted to please. Eventually, she became interested in Christianity through her acupuncturist (though she never got stuck, and was more interested in the cookies she ate there than the lessons related to Christ) precisely because she wanted to become a devil, a villain.

When she is beaten by her family for converting, she goes off with a wandering priest (earlier seen destroying an idol and surrounded by Catholic thugs in Boxers) to start a new life. There's a fantasy element at work in this book as well, as Joan d'Arc appears to her in visions and talks to her. Yang relates the crazy story of Joan's life more-or-less in the background much like he relates the larger historical details of the Boxer Rebellion, giving the reader just enough to understand what's going on without shoving a long history lesson down their throat. Despite the fictional and fantastical elements of the story, it really is amazing how close Yang sticks to the facts as they are known, not sparing the brutalities of either side.

When Four is baptized, she takes on the name Vibiana and is restless, trying to find her true vocation as a Christian. When she learns of the Boxers killing Christians, she hits upon Joan's presence as a sign that she's to become a warrior maiden. For a moment, it appears as though she really is going to be Bao's opposite number. Instead, Yang uses this fractious, obnoxious and hard to like character as a tool to convey the most humane aspects of Christianity: love, mercy, compassion -- even in the face of certain death. In Boxers, Bao kills Vibiana but the details of the act are not shown. It takes nearly 500 pages for Yang to get to the heart of this book and his own beliefs when we revisit this scene from Vibiana's point of view. She refuses to renounce her religion and is willing to die for it. She is not a killer or warrior, and she gets this point when she sees Joan burning at the stake: Vibiana is a martyr, and her death does not go in vain. That's because of the last-act twist Yang throws in: she teaches Bao the Lord's Prayer, which he recites to a foreign soldier to demonstrate that he's a Christian. He's allowed to leave, and so Vibiana has protected at least one person.

Was this heavy-handed storytelling? It absolutely was. Was it earned, however? Again, it absolutely was. What Yang is trying to get across is not judgmental or preachy; rather, he pushes the idea that even in the face of annihilation, the core Christian concepts of mercy, compassion and love are to be cherished above all else. What separates this book from Yang's earlier work is that he was quite restrained in his storytelling and entertained multiple points of view. Indeed, though it's obvious to me what Yang thought was the "right" set of actions in the end, a reader with a different point of view could easily take the information presented to them and come to a different conclusion. For example, if Bao had been harder-hearted and single-mindedly did whatever it took to drive out the foreigners, then his rebellion might have succeeded and the lives of millions of Chinese citizens might have been vastly improved. One thing that Yang doesn't show is that after the rebellion, China was brutally punished and plundered. A utilitarian ethicist would point out that a few brief moments of individual compassion and weakness may well have cost the lives of millions. A Christian might answer that a kingdom born in blood would die in blood, and that's very much what happened here.

Visually, Yang's general restraint and simplicity served him very well. He cut way back on the slickness that impaired my interest in some of his work, a slickness that I consider to be the general house style of First Second. With Lark Pien as his colorist, Yang uses a generally simple and cartoony line and has most everything colored a light brown to reflect the dirt and drought surrounding the peasants in this story. Brighter colors appear only in two instances: when the gods descend and inhabit the bodies of the Boxers, Pien goes bananas with a dizzying array of colors assaulting the reader much as the Boxers assault their opponents; and when Joan appears to Vibiana as a golden image. In addition to demarcating fantasy from reality, that use of color serves to drive action and highlight dramatic sequences. Used sparingly, it adds to the sense of restraint Yang uses throughout his epic. While I think Yang is a storyteller who will also set out to hit certain narrative themes and hit them hard, he demonstrated in Boxers/Saints the ability to add layers of ambiguity, subtlety and humanity to his already sharply honed abilities as an action storyteller, character-based writer and humorist. It certainly feels like his PhD project in comics, especially given the way he managed a complex narrative and multiple characters, and I'm curious to see what he tackles next.

New Review @ TCJ: Level Up

Here's a link to a new review at the Comics Journal: Level Up, by Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham.

Sequart #33: American Born Chinese

This review was originally posted at Sequart.com back in 2007.

Ultimately, the moral of AMERICAN BORN CHINESE is not especially profound. Gene Luen Yang's three storylines converge to deliver the message of be who you are. Resist the urge to assimilate. Be proud of your heritage and stop trying to deny it. What makes this such an enjoyable and effective story is the way he tells it. Yang throws three competing narratives at the reader, all of which wind up converging in exciting and unexpected ways. One of them is a slice-of-life account of a young Chinese-American student who moves to a new town and finds himself on the receiving end of his almost entirely all-white class. The second storyline involves a mythical monkey-king who is denied access to a party in heaven and responds by trying to elevate himself to a higher class of deity. The third storyline involves an all-American high school student who is tortured by his (inexplicably) Chinese cousin Chin-Kee, the personification of every negative Chinese stereotype imaginable.

This narrative strategy is what prevents the book from devolving into a heavy-handed exploration of both racism and self-hatred. By starting with the colorful tale of the Monkey King, Yang begins the book on a fantastical note. The story then shifts to Jin Wang, the young Chinese-American boy who only wants to fit in. Yang deftly folds humor into what is clearly a painful story to tell. Some of the humor winds up having unexpected repercussions, like when Jin Wang tells an apothecary's wife that he wants to be a Transformer when he grows up, and she tells him that he can do it easily, as long as he doesn't mind losing his soul--and he eventually does.

What really gives the book its power is Yang's shockingly awful Chin-Kee, a stereotypical buck-toothed, slant-eyed, yellow-skinned simpleton. This use of this out-of-nowhere boogeyman of a racial stereotype who comes along once a year to humiliate his blond & blue-eyed cousin Danny is an audacious choice by Yang. The use of a stereotype to attack stereotypes is a risky move, but the same technique of alternating narratives that breaks up the tone of Jin Yang's story serves to provide relief from Chin-Kee. He's funny and horrible and while clearly a satiric figure (who later serves a very specific and unexpected purpose), he also seems to be a bit of a cathartic exercise for the author.

Jin Wang meets a new boy in his class named Wei-Chen, who was sent to America from Taiwan. Jin initially wants nothing to do with him, but they eventually become friends. Meanwhile, we follow the Monkey King's saga as he's punished by god and buried under a pile of rock after he tries to be anything but a monkey. Things escalate from there in each of the three storylines as things go very wrong for all of our protagonists, but it's Jin selling his soul that proves to be a key moment for all three narratives.

Yang is a skilled storyteller, even if his art is so slick at times that it deflects emotional resonance. The stories are deceptively simple, but minor details later take on greater significance in clever ways. The end result is an examination of some very real and painful issues successfully integrated with memorable characters. I'm not sure the catharctic ending is entirely earned, but there's no question that the structure of the plot, the interweaving of the storylines, and the sheer power of attacking racist tropes with an outrageous satirical figure make this a compelling read.

Three Views of Escapism: The Eternal Smile

Rob reviews THE ETERNAL SMILE, a collection of three short stories written by Gene Luen Yang and drawn by Derek Kirk Kim (First Second).


With THE ETERNAL SMILE, Gene Yang cements his place as a sort of O. Henry of comics. He has a knack for setting up quickly identifiable characters and situations, then turns them on their head with a clever twist. AMERICAN BORN CHINESE had three apparently unconnected short stories that dealt with identity, shame and trying to fit into a foreign world that linked together in unexpected and touching ways. There were times in which the story's elements felt a bit too on the nose, a bit too heavy-handed in pushing its themes, yet there was no denying Yang's skill as a storyteller. THE ETERNAL SMILE has a number of the same virtues and problems, as it presents three stories with vivid characters, wholly unexpected plot twists (reality twists, really) and sometimes pat handling of the notion of escape and escapism. Yang is aided by the stunning visuals of Derek Kirk Kim, who draws each story in a style so dramatically different that it's hard to believe that it was the same artist all along.


The first story, "Duncan's Kingdom", was originally published a decade ago by Image. The concept is as strong and clever as ever: a young knight is sent to avenge the death of the king, hoping to win the hand of the beloved princess in marriage. All is not as it seems, as young Duncan wins a bit too easily and is faced with the bizarre specter of a bottle of something called Snappy Cola. Aided by the mysterious, masked Brother Patchwork, he starts to question his world and finds it crashing down around him. The story is undone at the end, without revealing its twist, by an unearned and treacly sentimentalism. The character details dumped on the reader toward the end just felt cliched, as Yang stacked the deck in creating the reasons behind the escapist scenario.


If "Duncan's Kingdom"'s main thrust is the way escapism can literally imprison someone, then "Gran'pa Greenbax and the Eternal Smile" is about how a dream can ultimately push you beyond the limitations of your life. This story starts as an affectionate tribute to the Scrooge McDuck stories of Carl Barks and then starts to uncomfortably twist the greed of his stand-in (an anthropomorphic frog named Gran'pa Greenbax) until the story careens to a halt after a shocking acts of violence. Kim's skill really carries the story at this point, simultaneously making the violence both cartoony (and hence funny) and visceral (and thus shocking). The story is successful because it subverts the familiar elements of Barks ("profitable adventures", over-the-top set-ups, cute sidekicks and most especially a pool full of cash), taking them to their logical extremes. That level of attention to detail extends to the way the story's colored (evoking 4-color comics) and even the "cover", mimicking old Gold Key Disney comics. The real twist of the story (beyond the obvious deus ex machina halfway through) is that it's a scathing parody of religion-as-corporation and corporation-as-religion (specifically, Disney). Gran'pa Greenbax's burning desire to swim in a pile of cash winds up masking another, more primal desire--one achieved to the great surprise of the story's antagonist.



The most successful story overall was "Urgent Request", a story about a meek programmer named Janet who is pretty much made to feel utterly insignificant by everyone around her. Kim's visuals once again really stand out here, using a cartoony, blobby character design and a violet wash that gives the story a certain solemnity until the story turns and we are smacked in the face by vivid color. The story's about Janet falling for the old "Nigerian prince" internet hoax and plunging a bunch of money to a grateful "prince" in Africa. Feeling special for the first time in her life, even though deep down she knew it was all a lie, Janet goes all-out in her identification with Africa and imagines a romance with "Prince Henry". Yang walks a careful line with Janet, making her a sad sack that we can't help rooting for because she's trying so hard, but avoids making her completely pathetic. Even in the moment of what should have been her greatest humiliation, the good will that Yang built up for Janet allows him to instead make this a moment of transformation.


This story spells out Yang's view on escapism, that it's less an abandoment of how things really are and instead a different way of looking at the world, a shifting of perspective. Sometimes, this shifting of perspective blinds one to what's really going on, while at other times this shift is the only way one can extricate oneself from misery. Sometimes taking oneself out of character (and the story one's created) is the only way to achieve the happiness we seek, and sometimes creating a new story is what's needed. Yang implies that it's how active one is in applying this perspective is how positive it winds up becoming. Duncan's story was one of passivity, something that he had to shed. Gran'pa Greenbax was spinning his wheels in pursuit of happiness and had to think laterally and take a leap of faith to extricate himself from his life. Janet Oh created a reality around a hoax presented to her and made it become a sort of incubator for the person she wanted to become. For Yang, it all boiled down to faith in something beyond our immediate narratives and selves: escape as an activity, not a soporific.