MOCA: Alt. Comics and Marvels & Monsters

Museum of Chinese in America: Alt. Comics and Marvels & Monsters

Two exhibits in the Museum of Chinese in America

An event of 2012

Alt. Comics and Marvels & Monsters

·         The Alt. Comics portion featured artists from both the East and West Coast who are Asian American who worked on comics touching on the topic of being Asian in America.

·         They have a noted connection web where the cartoonists of the West Coast are part of a group called “Art Night.” The East Coast artists are similarly with their own connections.

·         The artists featured included Larry Hama, Alex Joon Kim, Derek Kirk Kim, Jerry Ma, Christine Norrie, Thien Pham, Lark Pien, Jason Shiga, GB Tran and Luen Yang.

·         Their art featured included works they are currently on, as with the case of G.L. Yang. Yang also worked on American Born Chinese, a graphic novel I enjoy.

·         The West Coast artists notably praise each other in their descriptions.

·         The works featured are that of the original pencils and inks with the exceptions of printed copies of the artists’ publications.

·         The gallery also included sketches the artists did in childhood.

·         Some artists are in relationships or married to some others.

·         The Marvels and Monsters portion featured an analysis on how Asians were portrayed in comics: mostly in archetype yellow face.

·         The exhibit opens with exaggerated color tones of yellow and brown colors that were used on Asian characters in comics: a noted difference from the white comic counterparts who had normal skin colors to them.

·         The archetypes covered were that of Schemers (Dr. Fu Manchu), Dragon Ladies, wise Sages, submissive women and others: all of which still has some prevalence in how Asians are portrayed in American comics and even American media today.

·         The archetypes of making the Asians look evil or lesser than their white counterparts was not limited to Chinese, as Japanese and other races of people were shown to cover the spectrum of archetypes.

·         For the Dragon Ladies, they were attractive foreigners of noted height, as they were drawn as tall as white people.

·         They included pages of Mary Marvel, the Unknown Soldier, Dr. Strange, Iron Fist and other known comics to show how Asians were commonly portrayed with a white character to introduce them. Not until recently had Asians been allowed to be the starring focus of their own in American comics.

·         If one were to wait for a guided tour, there was also an included exercise where one was to draw out your actual self versus your ideal self for Asian participants.

·         Overall, I like the exhibits and the museum and not only because I myself am an Asian American person

REVIEW: The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

By Ann Marie Fleming

Published September 2007

· It was interesting on how Ann Marie had multiple interpretations on her great grandfather Long Tack Sam on his various tales of how he became who he was, as all her accounts were from second hand sources. Fittingly, I liked how she illustrated this in a Golden Age style origin story. Most noted to me was that she had a total of five different origins to the mystic arts and magician’s fame, some of which contradict one another. While these panels were straighter forward in nature compared to the collage of her other pages, they are noted to adding her interpretations of the times Long Tack Sam was popular, especially with Golden Age inspired art. (Fleming, 11-16, 38-43, 61-63, 65-67, 77-79)

· When Ann Marie was asked to take pictures next to her grandmothers, I found it interesting that she maintained her anonymous character persona through the scene by having a hand-drawn version of her stand next to the illustrations. While minute in detail, it shows the degree of reliability of her journey to the viewers within the continuity of her decision to have a drawn version of her be the representation one follows through the entirety of the book. This is opposed to having the true photograph of her next to the illustration, which would bring about an entirely different connotation altogether. (Fleming, 8)

· Reading this, I had a personal discrepancy with the ambiguity of her choice of composition on one page. While there was an arrow leading the viewer to read downwards on the piece, I couldn’t help but misread the piece by reading the panels continuously left to right as opposed to top to bottom. This would’ve been easily solved with a better planned composition of panels or dividing the page’s composition into two pages so as to remove the bad flow of reading for the viewer. However, this is just my personal observation. (Fleming, 7)

· It was a nice touch to add notable dates on the border of the pages, yet I felt that they were not necessary to the story and instead served as filler. My reasoning behind this is that she started out her journey to knowing her great grandfather with some noted dates yet the composition soon had them almost removed from the book entirely until the very end, where they jolt out in bulk to cover for the credits of the book. I can see why she placed them there, as a means to tie to the culture at the time. However, they serve little to the understanding of Long Tack Sam as the bulk of the graphic novel is dedicated to the mysteries of his stage life, not the mundane of the world around him. There wasn’t even a guarantee that he necessarily would be one to partake in the developing music and technology during those dates. (Fleming, 10, 50, 164-170)

· I liked how the pictures drawn to illustrate Long Tack Sam were at the time not the stereotypical Yellow face that captivated America since the Gold Rush and the first Chinese immigrants. This may be due to the fact that the illustrators may have not been American, but regardless of that fact it holds that Long Tack Sam was respected enough in his art that he wasn’t considered a “rat man” when drawn to promote his talents. It might’ve helped that he always wore the contemporary Chinese clothing at the time, thus noting his ethnicity, but that had little to do with his status in my opinion. (Fleming, 96)

· As a Charlie Chaplin fan, I find it interesting that Ann Marie made her statement about the black and white star with her noting of the rise of Hitler and other noted characters and people at the time. This, compared to the random dates previously noted, actually served the narrative well as it brought out the contemporary problems and influences at the time that people can research should they wish to relate to it. (Fleming, 103)

· The new reel from how Long Tack Sam refused to involve his daughters in racial lessening of Asians in the film industry at the time was notable. It showed the sense of ethnical pride that few note Chinese people at the time had. It denoted an interesting sense of Nationality from a man who traveled from place to place and had no permanent home of his own during his career. It was significant that Ann Marie chose to place illustrations of how beautiful her grandmothers were with how the American film industry noted them “too pretty” to portray Chinese people for their productions. It was even noted that Ann Marie provided newspaper that showed how much of an impact Long Tack Sam had to not wish for his family to be involved in the demeaning of Asian people in the public eye.(112-113)

· Overall, this was a great book. The small flaws it had me pause for a moment to contemplate what Ann Marie was trying to bring about in the plot of her journey, however they had little effect on the reading of the graphic novel. Her use of blending hand drawn illustrations with photographs and references as a collage made this an avant garde piece of work.

Bibliography:

Fleming, Ann Marie. The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. New York: Riverhead, 2007