In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, Keith Chow recently interviewed Greg Pak and several other Asian American comic book creators for the Diamond Bookmark Newsletter. Parts of Chow’s interview with Pak can be seen at the Diamond website. But the full text of the interview has never been seen — until today! Below is the entire Chow/Pak interview, courtesy of Keith Chow and Diamond.
KC: Like any other literary genre, there’s a lot of diversity in comics that might fly right beneath the radar in most mainstream circles. So my first question is how does being Asian American inform your work?
GP: I grew up at a time when the most prominent Asian American character in mainstream media was a dude in a teen flick who’d fall out of trees to the sound of a gong. So I’ve been annoyed by stereotypical imagery in mainstream media almost as long as I can remember. At the same time, I’ve always been hugely impressed by the way films speak a universal emotional language and have the power make us fall in love with anyone. I always paraphrase Spike Lee, who once wrote something along the lines of “the more specific something is, the more universal it becomes.” The idea is that if you actually depict a character fully, with all of his or her background taken into account, the audience will get it, even if the character is completely different from the audience. In fact, it’s precisely because you’ve depicted the character so specifically that the audience gets it — something that’s true in your character’s life, if it’s presented in the right way, will resonate with something true in every viewer’s life.

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