American Born Chinese
First Second
Long's umbrage begat the umbrage of the online comics community, and a mini-controversy sprung up regarding graphic novels versus graphic-less novels. Considering the fact that American Born Chinese is the only one of the five nominees in its award category that I've actually read, I'm ill-equipped to weigh in on whether or not it deserves to win. But it certainly deserves to be at the center of some controversy, if only because controversy, even more so than award nominations, draws the attention of readers. And American Born Chinese certainly deserves readers' attention.
Yang's book is devoted to three seemingly unconnected stories. There's an autobiographical-feeling story about being one of the few Asian kids in an all-white school. There's a sequence structured like a TV show called "Everyone Ruvs Chin-Kee," in which a hideous buck-toothed, yellow-skinned Asian stereotype—one that makes Sixteen Candles' Long Duk Dong seem positively enlightened—runs riot over his American cousin's school-life. Then there's an exceptionally lighthearted re-telling of the Monkey King myth from the classic Journey to the West.
At the climax, Yang begins to tie the three together in a surprising way, gracefully weaving a story in which no word or image is wasted. It's a powerful examination of the desire to fit in while growing up, in which being Asian in America is either the central conflict or a metaphor for it, depending on the reader's own identity.
Midnighter No. 1
DC/Wildstorm
The latest development on the gay hero front came last week, when DC's Wildstorm imprint launched a new series starring the Midnighter, making him the only gay male superhero starring in his own book at the moment. It would be nice to say that writer Garth Ennis doesn't make a big deal out of it and, to a certain extent, he doesn't. The thrust of the book isn't that Midnighter's gay, only that he's a total bad ass who spends his off-time in ridiculous action scenes like punting tank shells and knocking bad guys' heads clean off. But Ennis never misses an opportunity to have one of those bad guys refer derisively to Midnighter's sexuality. In a scene sure to ruffle feathers, Midnighter chokes off one such slur by jamming his battle staff down the character's throat. As symbolism goes, it ain't exactly subtle.
Putting gayness aside for a moment, Ennis does manage to give readers one of the looniest cliffhangers in recent memory with the last page. After Midnighter is captured and has a remote-controlled bomb implanted in his chest to assure his compliance, his captor informs our hero that from now on, he must kill for them or die. He holds up a photo of the target and it happens to be a person most people would gladly kill for free—in fact, whether or not you'd go back in time and kill this particular individual if given the chance has become something of an ethics-focused parlor game over the years.