Configuring an Asian American Subject through Comics

Abstract

In his preface to Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (2009), Jeff Yang addresses that “a quarter of the kids are Asians” in national comic book conventions like Comic-Con and that many comic book artists are Asian Americans (11). While Asian Americans take a substantial part of comics industry, however, writers in Secret Identities argue that there are not many Asian (American) superhero characters. Comics writers thus employ (auto)biographical voices not only to debunk Asian Americans’ marginalized place in comics narratives but also to push the literary convention to the critical contours. In particular, some artists revisit hero genres in an attempt to appropriate the American mythology in which an Asian American protagonist reinvents his or her subjectivity. In this article, I discuss the ways in which Asian American artists interweave comics, short stories, and autobiographies together to configure their racialized experiences, and I focus on “Preface: In the Beginning” and “Driving Steel” to examine the critical location of current Asian American writers.