Secret Identities is the FIRST Asian American Superhero comic book ever made. It was released earlier this year in the month of April. It contains the awesome stories of male and female Asians fighting crimes with their super powers against prejudices in society. Secret Identities also takes you into the everyday lives of your average Asian American living through the daily struggles that they face and what they do to overcome them.
The authors of this book: Jeff Yang, Jerry Ma, Keith Chow, and actor Parry Shen, all of whom I had a pleasure of meeting earlier this year at ECAASU, did a spectacular job of keeping you wanting for more and more as you turned each page of the book. The illustrations were very vivid and placed you right there next to the featured characters. There was also a great deal of humor used throughout Secret Identities.
Secret Identities opened with the authors talking about ideas of making the comic book. One of my favorite stories was A Day At Costume Co. Fighting crime isn't just for the male superhero. In it, there was a superhero family and one of the girls didn't have her super powers yet. An incident happened that turned the place upside down and the very girl that didn't have her super powers gained them in time to save the day. This story also tied into the personal lives of the Asian American female, who faced daily, the stereotype society has set against her, boxing her up into their ideal image of what an Asian female is supposed to be like.
There were other cool stories like 9066, which was about a Japanese American superhero, which was accepted by his non-Asian superhero friends to help in their crime fighting until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. After that, the same superheroes that he thought were his friends betrayed him and wanted to turn him in because of his Japanese roots.
The Blue Scorpion & Chung had an Asian sidekick whose non-Asian buddy would take all the credit for his crime fighting. The story of The Hibakusha was about children who gained super powers from the effects of the A-Bomb that dropped on their cities and when they learned about their powers they soon decided that they needed to break free of their captors.
You can pick up a copy of Secret Identities from Barnes & Noble or order a copy online from Amazon.com
SECRET IDENTITIES "IN THE BEGINNING" PREVIEW
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