Marvels and Monsters

NPR visits an exhibit at NYU that highlights Asians depicted in comic books.

From the piece...

KEYES: Jeff, the exhibition kind of looks at the way comic books and current events mesh together. Over time, how has American history influenced the way Asians are depicted?

YANG: One of the things that we realized as we looked at this collection - and the collection is extraordinary. He has collected literally hundreds, thousands of comic books across a span that, in many ways, defines the forge of Asian America, in a way, you know, 1941 all the way through 1986, a period of time in which America was engaged in physical wars and sort of spiritual ones with Asian countries - you know, from World War II, the war in the Pacific, through the Korean War, Vietnam War, and then the economic and political battles with Japan and China that followed.

And so comic books, in a lot of ways, pick up a lot of this resonant energy around how Americans were thinking of Asians in ways that virtually no other medium does. You see this character, like the character of the Yellow Claw emerging, this sort of monstrous, incredibly alien, exotic figure, this puppet master behind the scenes emerging just as America's anxiety around Chinese immigration, around the changing demographics of the country was first beginning to be felt.