Chinatown exhibition examines Asian portrayals in comics

His skin is a preposterous shade of yellow more appropriate to a Kool-Aid flavor. His bald oval head is crowned with a topknot tied with a red bow; he has squinty eyes and buck teeth that extend over his lips and the most garish yellow-on-green outfit you'd ever find in a circus supply store.

Meet Chop-Chop, a comic book character who made his debut in 1941 in the first issue of the long-running superhero comic series, Blackhawk.

Ugly, almost inhuman, the rotund guy would make for a great villain.

Trouble is, he's supposed to be one of the good guys.

Blackhawk is one of the comic books featured in Marvels & Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986, a new exhibition at the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia's Chinatown, which takes a long, hard, critical look at the depiction of Asians and Asian Americans in superhero comics.

Originally shown last spring at New York University, the show includes panels and covers from a broad range of comics, including Doctor Strange, which features a mysterious Asian sorcerer and guru named The Ancient One; The Yellow Claw, from the mid-1950s, whose titular super-villain is a manipulative Fu Manchu look-alike; and the horror comic Tomb of Dracula, which features Dr. Sun, a former Chinese Communist scientist who has been reduced to a homunculus, a disembodied brain.

Marvels & Monsters will be on view through March 23 before going on a national tour. The exhibition will feature a panel discussion March 1, with four Asian American scholars from the region and comic book workshops for kids.

Asian Arts Initiative program assistant Nancy Chen said she was stunned when she first saw Marvels & Monsters in New York.

"I was shocked because I have seen these images before in my childhood but never stopped to think critically about them," she says. "It shows us that you can't take images for granted, that we need to look at them critically and to ask what kind of ideology they're promoting."

Chen said she hoped the show would give viewers a chance "to open up a dialogue about entrenched stereotypes of Asians over the years."

The exhibition was created by author and Wall Street Journal Online columnist Jeff Yang, whose books include Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to the Cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China.

Yang, a fiercely proud, lifelong Brooklynite, culled the pieces on display from an enormous cache of comics recently donated to NYU by science fiction author William F. Wu, who for four decades acquired any comic books he could find that featured Asians and Asian Americans.

"For [Wu], it was initially a lark," Yang said. "He grew up in Kansas in the 1950s and 1960s, where being Asian was a little exceptional. He grew up without seeing people like himself, so he gravitated toward works that had people who ostensibly looked like him."

The trouble is, Yang added, that comics - pop culture, in general - isn't exactly a window on reality, but a "funhouse mirror which gave him images that he did not recognize."

Images say, of Chop-Chop.

Blackhawk is about an international team of ace fighter pilots who band together to defeat Hitler and, after the war, other evildoers.

"They had a Scandinavian guy, a square-jawed American guy, a Polish guy," Yang said. "All the characters were represented with regular human features, until you get to Chop-Chop. It just gets wacky here, and while everyone else is heroic in the story, [Chop-Chop] was the butt of the jokes."

Blackhawk, which has been in print for 70 years, has evolved, especially where Chop-Chop is concerned.

"His depiction, and especially his complexion changed from orange-yellow to someone who looks like he has human skin," says Yang. By the 1960s, he's treated as a peer, and in the 1990s emerges as a bona fide superhero.

The University of Pennsylvania's Josephine Park, who will participate in the March 1 panel discussion, said the last 60 years of the 20th century were punctuated by a series of hot and cold wars between America and various Asian nations.

Images of Asians in pop culture shifted and changed depending on the conflict and the enemy in question - Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and, more recently, Chinese.

"The anti-Japanese stereotypes during World War II were extraordinary," said Park who heads Penn's Asian American studies department. "Standard newspaper cartoons would depict them as monkeys and different types of insects." Park said the American media took pains to show Americans that the Chinese were our allies and printed instructions on how to tell Chinese physiognomy from Japanese.

The war against Japan returned in a different way in the 1980s, with the rise of the Japanese auto and electronics industries, Park said.

Marvels & Monsters also features a collection of comic books and graphic novels by contemporary Asian American artists and writers, including Ken Chen, V.V. Ganeshananthan, David Henry Hwang, Greg Pak, Vijay Prashad, Larry Hama, and Greg Pak.

Visitors will be able to pick up and peruse the books.

Yang said the books attest to a sea change in the comic book industry, with the rise of a new generation of Asian American comic book creators who are calling the shots.

For some, their confusion and anger about the negative stereotyping they saw in pop culture as kids became inspiration for their art.

"When I was a kid, there was very little representation of Asians in TV or film except for egregious stereotypes like houseboys or cooks," Hama said by e-mail.

Hama, 62, was a senior editor at Marvel Comics when he left the company 20 years ago. He is currently artist in residence at NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute and currently writes G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero for IDW Publishing.

He said he tries to address the persistence of stereotypes in comic books in a very practical way. "In GI Joe, the only Asian character for some time was a bad guy (Storm Shadow)," Hama said.

"Over the course of an extended story arc, I changed him into a good guy, but more importantly, I made his story arc part of the . . . main storyline, so he is no longer a secondary character or a cipher."

In like fashion, writer and filmmaker Greg Pak took a well-known, traditional comic book hero, Hercules, and gave him an Asian American best friend, Amadeus Cho, in a series of Incredible Hercules issues.

"Amadeus is a super-smart kid. A Korean American, he's from Arizona," said Pak. "He can see the math and the physics behind everything and do remarkable things on that basis."

But isn't that a rehash of the tired image of the super-smart math whiz? "I play with the stereotype," Pak, 43, said. "For one thing, he wears his emotions on his sleeve. The [stereotypical] Asian American is emotionless and very controlled, almost robotic, a sort of terrifyingly efficient machine."

Pak studied political science at Yale University and history at Oxford and began his career in politics, working for Ann Richards when she was governor of his home state, Texas. He chucked it to study film at NYU.

Pak said he brings a passion for "racial justice" to his work as a comic book writer and filmmaker.

"A lot of the same things still motivate me and keep me interested in being political," he said, "My political motivation now is to tell stories that bring people together."