MECH CADET YU art from Takeshi Miyazawa and Triona Farrell.
My revamped email newsletter has been a blast so far — I’ve sent out three newsletters over the past few weeks with a few free comics and lots of news.
Today I’m sending out another edition with a nice discount coupon for the Greg Pak Shop and some exclusive sneak images that haven’t been shown anywhere else from an upcoming comic book!
Subscribe today and don’t miss out!
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So a little over 24 hours ago, I posted this on the Twitter machine:
Asian American creators — writers, artists, filmmakers, poets, actors, comics people, everybody! What are you working on? Let’s all talk it up and support the hell out of each other in 2018! #AsAmCreatorRollCall
— Greg Pak (@gregpak) December 21, 2017
Since then, the tweet’s been viewed over 115,000 times and dozens if not hundreds of Asian American creators have used the #AsAmCreatorRollCall hashtag to tout their work. And hundreds more people have retweeted those tweets.
And my heart’s grown three sizes.
Fifteen years ago, when my producers and I were taking our Asian American sci fi feature film Robot Stories to film festivals, I remember a distributor telling us to our faces that it seemed weird to him that the film had all these Asian people speaking English without accents. I think we just stared at him in astonishment. He didn’t say it in a rude manner; he wasn’t trying to be offensive. He just totally didn’t get it. He didn’t get the film, and he didn’t get us. Even though he literally talking to real live Asian Americans, he didn’t seem to understand that Asian Americans exist or could tell stories that other people could relate to.
In the end, Robot Stories played in over 75 film festivals and won dozens of awards. We self distributed the film theatrically, and with the help of a bunch of incredible grassroots Asian American film festivals, Asian American cultural groups, sci fi fan clubs, college organizations, and indie film fests, we played across the country and ended up getting picked up by Kino for a DVD release.
A lot has changed in fifteen years. But Asian American creators can still face tremendous difficulties getting stories about Asian American characters out into the world. But as I learned with Robot Stories and a bunch of other contemporary Asian American films like The Debut and Better Luck Tomorrow, when folks come together, we can make amazing things happen for each other.
So last night I saw the great Daniel Dae Kim retweet the great Justin Chon on Twitter:
#Inspired, brother. https://t.co/eUSmAxKlck
— Daniel Dae Kim (@danieldaekim) December 20, 2017
And shortly thereafter, I saw Reappropriate say some smart things about a recent list of 100 influential Asian Americans:
Just please, if you share this list also take a minute to remember the unsung Asian Americans who are also doing the work but whose names no one really knows. They are equally as important and influential, and today I want to give all my love to them, too.
— Reappropriate (@reappropriate) December 21, 2017
And I found myself thinking about how each of us is more powerful than we realize — particularly when we work together. And that one of the easiest things in the world to do is talk up the things we love so others can find out about them.
So big, big love to everyone who’s shared something using the #AsAmCreatorRollCall tag, and big, big love to everyone who’s retweeted anything someone’s posted using that hashtag. Folks are out there doing absolutely incredible work every day. Let’s all continue sharing in 2018, building that beautiful audience for everyone, and making the world we want to live in.
Please do check out the glorious projects and creators on display at #AsAmCreatorRollCall, and feel free to check out this very nice write up from Splinter News.
Big news — I’ll be a featured guest at the Universal FanCon in Baltimore, April 27-29, 2018! I’m super excited about this con — I even backed their Kickstarter a few years back! Here’s their mission statement:
Universal FanCon is the first large-scale, 24-hour, inclusive event that celebrates the diversity of fandom and the diversity of fans. With its broad range of attendees, celebs, and unique experiences – and its engaging, interactive festival atmosphere — FanCon is the place for everyone who is a part of the true fan universe.
I’ll be there all three days in Artists Alley and on various panels and whatnot!
Other guests include great colleagues and friends like Phil LaMarr, Jeffrey Vergge, Sumalee Montano, and Regine Sawyer. Oh, and Billy Dee Williams. 😉
The Return to Planet Hulk story continues as Amadeus fights in the Gauntlet to protect his new clan from the Warlord!
Words by me, art by Greg Land, colors by Frank D’armata, letters by Joe Caramagna.
Check out the preview below and ask your local shop to hold a copy for you today!
Just look at this. WEAPON X artist Yildiray Cinar is absolutely outdoing himself. And yes, Domino and Warpath are kissing in WEAPON X #14, which hits stores ON VALENTINE’S DAY! SERIOUSLY!
Ask your local comics shop to preorder this issue for you today!
A few days ago, I wrote about the precarious state of social media and internet services and how creatives and freelancers might consider revamping their email newsletters in order to maintain contact with readers and fans. That same day, Warren Ellis sent out some similar thoughts in his own email newsletter. And now Heidi MacDonald at ComicsBeat has written about both of those pieces!
Check it out — lots of great food for thought!
And please do sign up for my newsletter, natch!
And you can sign up for Warren Ellis’s legendary newsletter right here.
Smash Pages has interviewed my buddy and frequent collaborator, artist Takeshi Miyazawa! It’s a great interview that touches on his introduction to comics and his current work on MECH CADET YU. Here’s a cool excerpt:
You’ve been drawing comics for years and you’ve drawn robots over the years. Do you want to talk about how you designed the Robo Mechs for the series and how to give their own design and personality?
Like any kid from the ’80s, Transformers and Gobotswere properties I was obsessed with. Throw in some Gundam and old-school robot anime, stir it up, and that’s about where my brain is at with robots and robot design.
For this book, I paid particular attention to the generational aspect of the mechs in the world of Mech Cadet Yu. Skip Tanaka is the first to bond with a robot, therefore, his robot is square and blocky like an old Volvo. A real workhorse. The later robots that come to Earth become sleeker and more specialized in their strengths. Olivetti’s mech is a huge bruiser type while Sanchez’s mech has razorlike fins and sharper features. The man-made mech that Park controls is all angles and edges, something completely foreign to what we are used to seeing. So, playing with the various contrasts has been a great way to differentiate each mech from each other.
Read the whole interview here, and be sure to ask your local retailer to order you MECH CADET YU #5 and the first collected trade paperback, both in stores on January 3!
I’m just old enough that email newsletters made my career possible. And I’m starting to think that they’re going to save us indie creators and freelancers all over again in the coming years.
Back in 2002, when I was taking my feature film Robot Stories around to film festivals, I’d pass around a notebook and collect email addresses from every audience I spoke to. By the end of our festival run, we had no real budget for publicity for our theatrical run, but we had a few thousand email addresses. And that was better than gold. I sent out email newsletters every week, asking our amazing supporters to get their friends in whatever city we were visiting next to come see, come see! And they did!
As the years passed, I sent out fewer and fewer newsletters and spent more and more time on social media. Social media was easier, and let’s be honest — it was more fun. At first it seemed like we were all just goofing around on Twitter, telling ourselves it was good publicity but mostly just cracking jokes. But Twitter proved its enormous value when I started doing Kickstarters. Without Twitter, we’d have been hard pressed to drum up the kind of support we did for Code Monkey Save World, The Princess Who Saved Herself, ABC Disgusting, and Kickstarter Secrets.
But with each passing day, the culture and administration of Twitter seems to get more overwhelmed with negativity and harassment. Something’s going to break. And when it does, where does that leave all of the creatives and freelancers who have put so much of their outreach efforts into the site?
Continue reading
WEAPON X #12 hits stores today, with gorgeous art from Yildiray Cinar, colors by Frank D’Armata, cover by Razzah, and letters by Joe Caramagna. Check out the preview and go get it today!
CBR has just posted an interview with yours truly about the new WEAPON H book I’m writing and Cory Smith is drawing, along with some of Cory’s gorgeous art! Check out the excerpt below:
CBR: As a reader, it’s been interesting watching the development of Weapon H as he moves from mysterious character to antagonist to hero of his own story. What can you tell us about the evolution of the character from a creative and editorial standpoint? When you were first working on the character, did you ever think you’d be writing him in his own series?
Greg Pak: As a Wolverine/Hulk hybrid, Weapon H looks like a marketer’s dream, right? But the character developed organically through the story. Back when we were developing the “Weapons of Mutant Destruction” storyline, we established that the Weapon X scientists were collecting DNA from various mutants to turn people into killing machines. I said, “Well, we’ve got the Hulk in the book now. Seems like they’d want to collect Hulk DNA, too.” Suddenly, we had a Wolverine-Hulk hybrid on our hands.
We eventually revealed this Wolverine-Hulk hybrid as the ultimate weapon that Weapon X had been developing. And in the subsequent story that Fred Van Lente and I cowrote in Weapon X, we revealed that the man who was turned into this Wolverine-Hulk hybrid was Clay, a former soldier turned Eaglestar military contractor who’d been drugged and shipped out to Weapon X when he started challenging Eaglestar’s brutal operating procedure.
I loved all of this because it was a chance to explore familiar tropes of Wolverine and Hulk through a different kind of character. The big danger of both Wolverine and the Hulk is, traditionally, that they can lose control, go berserk. But Clay was chosen for this procedure because he has intense military discipline. The idea is that he’s the perfect weapon because he can control this tremendous power. But now Clay’s free from Weapon X — so the question is what a person with this tremendous discipline is going to do with this terrifying power?
For this book, I paid particular attention to the generational aspect of the mechs in the world of Mech Cadet Yu. Skip Tanaka is the first to bond with a robot, therefore, his robot is square and blocky like an old Volvo. A real workhorse. The later robots that come to Earth become sleeker and more specialized in their strengths. Olivetti’s mech is a huge bruiser type while Sanchez’s mech has razorlike fins and sharper features. The man-made mech that Park controls is all angles and edges, something completely foreign to what we are used to seeing. So, playing with the various contrasts has been a great way to differentiate each mech from each other.