 We've been talking about diversity in comics and about representation and those questions about representation always kind of boil down to like being able to recognize yourself as a reader in the things that you're reading. So I'm wondering if you could talk about an early time that you noticed yourself in a comic or if not in a comic then in some other form of media. And what that meant, of course. In high school I remember reading Veefer Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Blakie on the illustrator's name. But there's an incredible moment when there's a depiction of a lesbian who's in a concentration camp and I knew that I was gay at that point and read that and broke down sobbing for about a day because I realized, oh, if there was another Holocaust, I'd be in it. So that was this incredible moment of seeing myself and it was scary, but I'm profound. So I'm really glad that that happened. Crying is fun. Yeah, I mean for me it came really early on when I started reading For Better, For Worse by Len Johnston and just being amazed as like a nine-year-old kid that there was another character out there or another writer out there who went through the same things that I went through on sort of a day-to-day basis and had a lot of the same just emotional states. And this wasn't just true of the kids in the comic strip. Michael and Elizabeth were both just like exactly on either side of me age-wise. So I really related to the kids, but then I related to the parents in the strip too and it made me relate to my own parents, which I was like, wait, what? Because my parents aren't people, they're my parents. But, you know, Ellie and John were characters and they had thoughts too and it was really cool to get inside of their heads. It felt like I was getting into my parents' head in a way that I wouldn't have done otherwise. So, I mean, and I grew up with that strip. I started reading it at nine and I think it stopped being published sometime when I was in college. So it was just like a whole lifetime's worth of perspectives on myself and my family members and other people in our lives because of that. I don't think. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, people were always like there was a period when I was like in like high school where everybody wanted me to read Obasan because it's a story about this girl, this Japanese Canadian girl during World War Two. And I had no interest in Obasan. I was like, why? Just because she's Japanese and I'm Japanese, I had really no connection to it. And I've only ever read like the first two chapters and I just refused to read it. So I feel like there was sort of the sense, the place where I saw myself first was when I read Louise Fitzhugh's Harry at the Spy because I was like, I'm a spy. I'm really nosy and I want to like follow my neighbors and write down what they're doing to. So that was my first like real connection with a person. And then I mean, as a lesbian, I just saw like snippets like there's like, you know, a lesbian-ish character and like in the background of some like 90210 episode or something. So it was just like moments and then like a lot of really bad lesbian movies. And then one time my mom gave me this book called Scavengers or gave me my mom left out this book called Scavengers, which was about these millionaires who get stranded on a desert island and then these two women end up having sex on it. And I remember being like, this is the most amazing book I've ever read. I will always love this book forever. Like I have seared in my memory. So I didn't really see myself in anything until I guess I got to college and started reading Hothead Pizon and which is amazing. And thanks to watch out for was probably the first like lesbian comic that and I was also sort of like then, you know, it sounds like I knew the lesbians in book form before I knew them in real life form. So I sort of expected them to be that way. And then when they weren't, I was like, so what's going on? Like, who are you people? Why don't you have a political cause? What's happening? I like some books when I was growing up that had characters that were not that didn't look like me at all and didn't come from backgrounds like mine. But I really identified with them anyway. You know, I was like, I was all about like Heidi and Anne of Green Gables and little women like, you know, I fantasized about being up on that mountain top with Heidi. I was Heidi. But I think that later on when I started to become like more self-aware of like, you know, being a refugee and an immigrant in Vietnamese American. And I started looking for more of that. I definitely wasn't finding any except for really bad representations in all the Vietnam War movies that my family would watch, hoping that this would be the one that like did it justice. And we were always disappointed. So I think that I had to do the book sort of as my revenge against all of those bad representations. And I think maybe GB Tran's graphic novel, Vietnam America was the first time that I saw in comics form anybody who looked anything like me. But before that, there was a movie that came out when I think I was in college called Three Seasons. And the director's name is Tony Bowie. So I mean, first of all, there was that we shared a name. And then, you know, sitting in the audience, and I remember the the credits going up and seeing a Vietnamese name in the director in the director's place and then the music coming up and then the all the actors coming up. And they were all Vietnamese is made me so, so happy. And I didn't realize until then how like hungry I was for that. And so a lot of you do whether I mean, some of you really directly write about write about your own experiences in your own communities and your work. And and for for some of you, it's it's a little more oblique. But how how has your your experience in in your community and in your family, how of those stories informed the stories that you're that you're telling today? And what about what about the form of comics makes those stories different or special? How are you telling them differently? Because you work in comics, then you might be able to in some other form, if you know, if you don't know. I didn't. So in my family, I didn't really know that I was Japanese Canadian for a very long time. I knew that my dad had like thicker eyebrows, but it was very, it was very vague. Like I knew that we ate with chopsticks. So I had all these pieces of it, but I was never like were Japanese Canadian until much later, like the actual meaning of it didn't really sink in until much later. And I think that that kind of vagueness, like I think that people sort of assume that if you have, if you're sort of like a racial or cultural identity is is over. And I think it depends on the family. And I like the idea of sort of showing it in sort of a sequence of interactions as opposed to being like this is a Japanese family and they have like, you know, like rice bats on the floor and all of this stuff. So I think the great thing about comics is that it really lets you show and not tell an experience. And there's a lot of power to being able to, you know, just kind of put things there without comment or show a scene, which sort of seems to be saying one thing and then have captions that kind of, you know, can contradict that, like to sort of say, like, you know, to show what doesn't maybe look like a very like Japanese Canadian scene, but then have a caption that sort of shows how much something means, which maybe doesn't seem to mean that much. That's a good point. I was praised early on for smile being so diverse. And I was like, what are you talking about? That's just what my friends looked like in San Francisco when I was growing up. I mean, my high school was I think 65% Chinese. And then there was a huge Filipino community and a pretty big Japanese community. And I was like the white girl amongst my peer group. And I never even realized that. I didn't notice that. I didn't realize that when I went to my friends' houses, they were serving me Persian food or Chinese food. It was just my friends' houses. So it's not, it wasn't something I was doing consciously, but I think what you just said about showing rather than telling is really powerful. And I have one short story where there's one girl wearing wait, how do you, the the headscarf? The hijab? Hijab, thank you. Forgive me for forgetting how to pronounce it. I have one girl in a background that has that. And I just remember getting like letters from kids like, wow, you know, I exist and you see me. And I'm like, oh, that's that's good. I need to do I need to do this more, but just to represent what I see as opposed to what I'm trying to see. I could say a lot more about this, but I want to let other people talk. For me, because all all the main characters in my book were Vietnamese, I wanted to focus on showing like a diversity of what it meant to be Vietnamese. And that there were like different classes or different personal styles or different haircuts. And, you know, so that Vietnamese wasn't like an archetype that you could summon and put into like a diverse cast. And like, you know, that Vietnamese didn't look one way. I wanted to show like a really wide range and include things like a political leanings could be very diverse or educational backgrounds, like just so that in the end they come off as just real people. Yeah, and and and one thing that's kind of interesting about about what you're saying with with the story you're telling is, I mean, so much of that book takes place during the the Vietnam War era, and they're like in American minds, they're such strong images attached to that. And it does seem almost in a way, or maybe you can say more that that you're that you're offering a counter narrative to some of like really the most ingrained images of the last 50 years in strictly, you know, American consciousness. Yeah, and those images are very isolated and you take them out of context. And so I realized that if I was going to tell a story about people who are from Vietnam who went through the Vietnam War, I would have to deal with any images that my readers have in their minds and any like cliches or stereotypes that they might be carrying or any like limitations to their understanding of the history. So I had to like give a bunch of history, sort of Trojan horse it into a personal family story. And then also like just give like very different representations to counter that stuff. So I was basically like just saying, forget all of the other stuff, I'm going to give you all of this and we'll just we'll just experience the story within a new set of terms. I think that I mean, just having that comics are a visual medium is really important because you can do the the show, not tell stuff that you're talking about. I mean, having a cast of characters, even the background, you can you can create those characters visually any way you want them to. But also there's something really profound about seeing oneself. I mean, you know, Alison Bechtel talked about when she created Dyches To Watch Out For that she wanted to make lesbians visible. So I mean, taking people who are traditionally made invisible and literally giving them kind of a face is really important as a visual narrative. And it just kind of it's also true with film, I suppose, and other visual media, but but comics are also dynamic in a bunch of other ways. There's a kind of DIY nature to them, which is really quite remarkable and I think kind of hard wired into the medium. You don't require a lot of resources to make a comic. You know, Alison, when she started off, she was terrible. I mean, really kind of an awful, she was a really awful draftsperson and and and she said that she was like there's no pressure with comics. You can kind of start into this thing and and her learning curve is kind of like was a slow, steady thing until she became one of the greatest cartoonists on the planet. But you know, that kind of having freedom and kind of space to do that is very much part of the comics community. I mean, kind of going to these different comic conventions and watching people make their own DIY, many comics and zines and kind of watching people develop is really kind of quite wonderful. You don't need to raise the funds that you would for a film or something like that. So that's, I think, part of how representation works in comics as well. Because if you don't see yourself there, you can, you know, take a ballpoint pen and a piece of paper and a photocopy machine and do it yourself. I mean, it will say too, I mean, going from prose to comics sometimes like I find that is like describing people's race in prose when you are sort of describing, there's this very sort of explicit language of like this person is black, this person is Japanese, which can feel very heavy-handed a lot of the time. Like you're like, I want you to know that there's a diversity of faces in this room, so I will describe them all for you. And the language we have to describe different sort of, you know, racial features is very limited sometimes. And I feel like, like sometimes I'll be, you know, reading something and I'll be like, you know, they get to the description of like the Asian girl in the room and I'm like, ah, with the all the shape guys. Like her hair was so shiny. I'm like, not all my hair. Okay, my hair is super shiny, but not all of her hair is shiny. So I think that there is this kind of like there's, it's actually kind of a relief to just be able to, to draw something or to have something drawn in my case because I don't draw. Then to, then to describe. And also identities that change, can change over time. Like Dylan Edwards did this book Transposes, which is a set of biographies of queer identified trans men. And what he was able to do is kind of show people's transitions over time in a way that pros couldn't do. Like how do you describe the very, you know, the intricacies of, of a transitioning body and, and, you know, Dylan was able to just kind of show this, which is really, you know, it doesn't have to be heavy handed, right? Yeah. I like the challenge that it gives to me as an artist to, it makes me observe a lot better because I can tell right away when I haven't looked at somebody enough, I can draw Vietnamese people all day long now because I, you know, I've been looking at them for a long time. The nose especially, like, like people think it's the eyes, but it's actually the nose. But then, like, if I try to draw somebody, you know, from Europe, now I'm like, oh gosh, what do they look like? So it forces me to, to do my work better. Yeah. There is, I mean, not to, not to go like, you know, let's go porn here for a moment. So, so there, there is this kind of odd, you know, because you can look at something a lot and not look at it as an artist. So I had this kind of weird thing when I was making Hard to Swallow where I was, I had a kind of Dixlexia where I kept on I kept on, I kept on flipping the penis so that the the top the like the front comes up like right at the bottom of the penis, right? And I kept on only seeing the top of it. So I'd always draw the top and my, my co-creator kept on like, you did it again. Like, this is really weird, you know, like, you keep on flipping the penis. And, and I mean, and I deal with a lot of penises like right here all the time. And I wasn't looking at them as an artist and paying attention to what they actually look like as opposed to kind of my anyway. Librarians are super cool. So as educators, this is such a hard follow up. Literally as educators I know I'm sorry, I didn't mean to and creators, how have you incorporated using comics in your classrooms or in your work? Oh, like, I love going to classrooms to do comic book workshops. I think it's amazing. I think watching kids tell a story. It's a it's a way to tell a really fast story, right? Like getting kids to draw like three panel or four panel comics is one of my favorite things. And also just even the one of the my favorite new things is a video series like a YouTube series called Strip Panel Naked, which everybody should watch. If you love comics, if you're not watching this thing, it's so good. I can't remember the guys. His first name is Hassan. It's so amazing. And so just even just like putting comics up and getting kids to read into character, like to get into a conversation about perceptions and subjectivity and, you know, metaphor and all of this stuff, like just by showing just like putting two comic book pages. I use he does this thing where he uses these two pages from Plutonia and just putting those up and getting kids to read into what's going on with the person is like the number of conversations that I've had with kids about, you know, what you see and what you know about a person just by putting those two pages up and talking to them for like half an hour about them has been just incredibly illuminating. My work is really personal. So just for example, Smile was my first original graphic novel that was published and it was about my dental experience as a middle schooler and it's harrowing. And that invites a lot of kids to be like, I have braces. And do you want to see my palate expander, you know? And so so I don't think of myself as a natural teacher educator. It's just it's just not what I think is my wheelhouse. But when I get into a room of kids and they don't think they're writers, they don't think they're storytellers, they don't think they could draw a comic, I'm like, why don't you just tell me about the grossest thing that's ever happened to you. And everything changes. Like they all want to tell me about it in detail from start to finish. And I'm like, just write it down. Just just go do it right now. You can do it. And I'll do an example. I'll say, OK, you tell me your story and then I'm going to draw it. So I do this thing called them, turn your life into a comic, right? I get them to do that in an hour. And then by the end of the hour, they have all written a comic about their life. And usually it's just one page, but it's always the grossest thing that's ever happened to them. And they love that. That's really good. I'm going to use that. Do it. Do it. And I also encourage my fellow cartoonists, my fellow humans to like steal each other's ideas because no one's going to know that I told you that like you're going to walk into a workshop. It's on tape. Oh, OK. Along with Justin's amazing story. So my point is like the kids don't know. Yeah, no, I love it. They'll be stoked. They also want to tell you their story about the grossest thing that's ever happened to them. Yeah. I mean, periodically I will write on Facebook or whatever like I need to do our writing exercise. Can everybody just give me and anybody who doesn't share I'm like, you are not a share. You are uncool. You're down with the cause because we're all just there to like, yeah, talk with kids about stuff. And they love that. And then you feel closer to them and they've opened up and it just it just creates a really cool environment. You know that they got their appendix out. Yeah. I was a public high school teacher before I was a cartoonist. Partly part of why the book took so long was because I was doing it on weekends and school holidays while I was teaching full time. But because I had comics on my mind all the time, I just made my students do comics. I was teaching at Oakland International High School, which is like an alternative public high school for all English language learners, recent immigrants. There's like a lot of pressure for them to adapt to a new country and learn English and graduate from high school and pass the KC exam all at the same time. So in my art class, I had them tell me their immigration story in the form of comics. Because I figured, oh, I can teach them like a few conventions, like sort of a new language, the visual language. And then they can surprise me. And we did that for four years. And then by the fourth year, I had a really nice selection of comics to make into like a nice coffee table book. And we had a book launch. And the mayor came, the kids signed her book. And it's part of the Oakland Public Library now. And it made them feel really seen and heard. But actually, I think, hold on, I'm going to pull it out from under the table here. Yes, they did bring it. So the funny thing that I learned about kids and books is that grownups like this project a lot more than the kids did. Some of them were like, you're giving me a book. But my hope is that in 10 years they'll see things differently. Because these are amazing stories. And they're just the first pass at someone trying to tell their life story. And so they're going to have this record of how they were thinking when they were 16. And then maybe when they tell that life story for their college application essay, it's going to be a little bit deeper. And then when they're a little bit older and they're willing to share more of the stuff that they were hiding back when they were like a teenager, they'll have more practice at telling their story. But what they really liked was actually using Photoshop to cut up the panels and then record their voice and add color and stuff and make a little mini movie. So I think maybe this generation that I was teaching is just way more into moving pictures than the static images in a book. But I think they're related. I rarely teach kids. I have done that a little bit. But I love teaching people who and I mostly teach comics students that are there to make comics. But occasionally, I'll get a chance to do something different. And last semester, I was teaching in the Czech Republic on a Fulbright to teach in the American English Studies department and the history kind of American comics. And they were asking me if I was going to have a test at the end. And I was like, I have never made a test in my life. I don't even know how to do that. So you're going to make comics. And they're all kind of freaked out. These are all like highly academic, like very rigorously academic European students. And I'm like, you know, and they're terrified of drawing, which is a pretty common thing you'll run into if you teach comics. But the counter is that this is a linguistic structure. You can make great comics with stick figures. It's basically about kind of cracking the code of this language. And once I kind of got that through to them, they got really excited. And by the end of it, they were all cranking out comics. And we had a show as well and did kind of comics readings from it. And, you know, these are students that rarely get asked what their own stories are. So a lot of them are about, like, depression and suicide. But it was really, it was incredibly gratifying to see people kind of open up in that way, open up narratively and about their own lives. That's amazing. I want to see all of these. Brian, you said did we ever get a handheld mic? OK, so we have a handheld mic. If anybody has questions that they want to bring to the panel right now, that's fine. I think all of us are willing to get interactive here. Are there any, do you have any questions for the panel right now? Yeah. Hello. This question is for Mariko. Hi. First, I just wanted to say that I had a fabulous experience teaching this one summer in a community college classroom. So though it's labeled as a young adult book, I encourage everyone to check it out. They went really in-depth with it. And I'm curious about the process of collaborating then with an artist. So how much, because there's some really beautiful scenes. It's very sparse on text and some beautiful scenes. And how much of that were you writing or were you coming up with together? So I started writing comics with Jillian. She was my first, she was my first. She's also my cousin. So I was kind of weird, yeah. She's my first collaborator in comics. And I came from a theater background. So I really, the first comic book scripts I wrote were really like plays. And I write acts and scenes. And I write sort of a basic like here's what's happening, here's what's going on with each of the characters and then captions and dialogue. So in terms of what's happening, the visualization of it is Jillian's. The what is happening, the original of what is happening is in the script. But really I think it's about, I mean it's a very hard thing to describe and it's a very individual thing like you really are two people writing the same story. And one of the, so skim when we wrote skim together because it was a diary, it was just sort of the diary and then there was a lot of room for whatever Jillian wanted to do in terms of the illustrations. This one summer was very different because it's more of a like in the moment type comic. And we really sort of did a lot of back and forth and talking about we edited it together. We sort of fixed the story together once the original script was written. But yeah, like one of my favorite parts of making comics is that there is another person who's writing the story with you. And I really do think of it as there is this kind of, you know, which we've come across a lot where people will say like written by and illustrated by, which kind of creates this like two layer thing where it's like this is the text and these are the illustrations that go with the text. And really what it is, is it is like two elements working together, you know, created by two different people to tell a story. And I think that there is this kind of changing attitude. We use the word co-created, which is linguistically the most awkward word. I hate it. But it is the most accurate description of, as opposed to saying like written by two people. But yeah, I can't imagine doing the whole thing myself. It would make me crazy. And it takes so long. And I actually had the pleasure of working with a bunch of different illustrators. And since then, the like style has changed from script to script, depending on what people like. Casey actually pointed out to me, Brian Kavan, I guess, says that he thinks of his comic book script as a letter to his illustrator. And I think that that really is, like, it's like a, it's like your thesis. Only two people will ever read it, right? Like, it's a very personal thing. A very in-depth, involved personal thing that you write for your editor and the person you're working on the comic book with. So yeah. That's why sometimes I'm just like, I hope nobody ever sees these scripts when they're so random. I mean, I think unlike, you know, like film, there isn't a specific format that's kind of accepted by the industry, right? So it really does become a kind of individual decision by the collaborators. I've seen, you know, if you want to look at something that really kind of freak you out, check out Alan Moore's scripts for Watchmen, where he does an entire page of single spaced all caps for like an entire page for the first panel of the first page of the Watchmen. Yeah, just completely crazy making. And other people just, you know, do kind of loose play scripts, essentially? Or, you know? I mean, I've read, I got to read Jean Yang's script once, was like, feels so like, awkward, like, I'm reading his scripts. He doesn't even know. I'm sorry. He knew, he knew. But it is very interesting because it is this very personal voice. And then like, like mine's a very personal voice. Like, I'll say like, OK, we're getting into it now. This is going to get crazy, like, like in my Hulk script. But also I feel like some of them are so technical and detailed. And I read, I can't remember his name, is he writes Fables? And William. And it was like, each snowflake, he was like, I want like more snow at the top and less snow here. And there's going to be a deer in the top right side. And it's going to be like, this kind of dark. And then you're going to see this thing in the corner. And I was like, like a whole page for one panel. Comic book script archive.com, I think actually archives these things, which is interesting to kind of see the different writers in their different formats. Oh my God, I hope mine aren't up there. Now there's almost no women writers on it, which is incredibly infuriating. But that's another thing. Another thing that I hear writers talk about is like, you know, they write out all of these things. They put all of these words in it. And then they send it off to an illustrator. And then when you get those pages back, you start seeing how few words you actually need. Oh yeah, then you strip a lot away. Yeah. Yeah, especially in every comic book that I've ever written, the number of words that you start off with and the number of words you end up with, it's like half. And you're like, sometimes you're like, this is a really funny line, but you don't need it. So I just huddle it away. Like, I know this is funny. I have it. But yeah, it is like it is a process of editing away and working with a space. I mean, it's a visual medium, right? So what are you going to do? You guys hand letter? You guys hand letter? Oh, heck no. No, I made a font. OK, all right. You made fonts that you're actually hand lettered smile. And it like is probably responsible for half the damage that I've done to my hand in my lifetime. Yeah, never again. I have a font too. Just make a font that looks like you're handwriting. But I did. Yeah, I was editing the text too much up until the very last minute. So I knew that my hand lettering was just going to kill the project. There is the real estate of the page. I mean, I think comic book scripting in a lot of ways is the most minimalist of any of the kind of scripting forms, because it literally takes up physical dimensions on the page, which is not true of film or playwriting or something like that. So you have to be really conscious about every single word. And for me, at least, there's always that moment that when I'm putting the script down on the page where I immediately start stripping away all the adjectives. And like, this is maybe a controversial topic. But the debate whether comics are eligible for Newbery awards. I've been somewhat privy to it and I've listened to different people have this argument. And I don't really have a strong position on it. But I fell down the rabbit hole once of reading heavy metal watching other people debate whether my books should or could be eligible for a Newbery. And they were like, well, if you just read her scripts, the characters are just like, yeah, I know, whatever. And it's like, that's not the script. Like the script itself is not just the dialogue. It is what else is happening besides the dialogue. So comics really is just this totally different language that we're speaking. And I'm fascinated too by people who write but don't draw or who draw but don't write. I can't separate the two from each other. I thumbnail. That means that when I write there are stick figures and panels and word balloons and little indicated backgrounds because I can't separate them. Well, and it's true because I think too it's funny because I always thought comic book writers were really laid back group of people because I thought, well, you must be really laid back because you're working on a project with someone where you're like, and now you do whatever you want to do. I'll be here hanging out if you ever need me. But then I've met comic book writers that are not like that that are also like, I'm not an intensely visual person. I don't think too much about the visual of the story when I'm writing it. I try to think of it as sort of being in the moment less like sort of I never think of it flat on the page and what it would look like. And there are writers who are, I think especially if you are also an artist, who know exactly what it's going to look like. Even if they're not drawing it, they have like a complete sense of how that's going to end up on the page for a motley crew. There is one script format where that Alison Bechdel came up with and then Jessica Abel refined where you basically write your script in Illustrator or in InDesign. So you're kind of creating these panels with little descriptors and dialogue on the page. So from the very beginning, the script has a kind of visual format to it. You know how many panels on the page more or less. And I also saw a kind of analog version of that at Maurice Velacoup's place where he was, he's working on his graphic novel. And he has each page is a complete this. He's got these massive folders for his graphic novel script. And they're all post-its, big post-its that represent, each one represents a panel. So they're like, boom, boom, boom, boom. And each one of these post-its has like individual markings on it. Wow. I started using that method for the visual scripting method for my online comics. I find it really helpful to just like go straight to the final product. So like if you know you're doing like a vertical scroll, you sort of like plot your text and then drawing your crappy thumbnails for the first version that way, but like all with the final dimensions in mind. And it was like just a quicker way for me than ever like doing any kind of like script in a Microsoft Word document. Well, and if you're working for a series, like for Super Girl or Hulk, because it's like a set number of pages you have to know. So I have basically a million drawings in my notebooks of like 20 little squares and then teeny tiny writing inside each of them, but like what it's going to look like. And if I lose that, I'm like lost. So I don't do them on post-its anymore because I lose those post-its. And then you're like going through all these pink squares like which is the pink square that has like the secret code on it. Are there other questions in the audience? I see a couple of questions over here. Hi, I wanted to ask you as writers of nonfiction, a teacher and also someone who's done Hulk as the writer or creator about the impact of visual propaganda and on your work and sort of how you teach it, how you see it, and how you had to perhaps if you had a situation where you had to change something because of your knowledge of the impact of visual propaganda. I'm not sure what you mean by visual propaganda. Like do you mean like like the sort of existing visual language out there and the meaning of certain images? For a lot of comics, there's a lot. Comics have been used historically as propaganda. That's what I meant. So like political propaganda and a lot of the conventions were established during that time period. So a lot of like our security when we read comics has to do with that time period and sort of our sense of otherness, American-ness, power, strength, violence, sex, et cetera. I mean, I think, you know, I have a master's in women's studies and yet I didn't know about visual propaganda. And so what do you know? It's from Canada. It's a master's in Canada. We're less concerned about visual propaganda, I guess. So I mean, I'm highly aware of like, you know, like the the meaning of the images that you're creating and like like falling into, you know, these things that are sort of been standardized. Like one of the things I decided a long time ago is which is not a visual thing but as a writer. I don't use, I try not to use accents when I write characters that are not white because I feel like the kind of standard image of, for example, an Asian speaker speaking broken English, I feel like has been kind of is kind of crystallized in the mind of like, this is the Asian speaker. And like that sort of like Indiana Jones, like Dr. Jones type thing, which look, I mean, I grew up with and I love that character and I spent like a whole year of my life calling my dad Dr. Jones or whatever. But I do think that you can see where you're like, there's another meaning to that thing that I would like not to to play into. And so I made that role for myself. And it's just sort of like the thing that's funny because I was asking Jean about this, like in terms of using accents and stuff like that. And he was saying, you know, like there's times when an accent is I'm actually curious to hear what you have to say about this too. Like there's a time when an accent is relevant, but it's hard when you know that you're also kind of recreating this thing that's been used for evil. You know what I mean? I will just talk about the cover of Smile, which has a big happy face on it with braces. And I hated that cover. And I was like, no, this is too simple. And it's it's too tied to what was in my head, like the dazed and confused stereotype of smiley faces, like that it it was kind of a passe high metaphor almost. Like that's just what I had associated happy faces with for quite some time. And my editor was like, don't worry, kids don't know anything about that. So it was that simple. They were just like, this is what we want on the cover. And Bookfairs liked it too. So they just trying to get children higher. You read it. And actually, this is this is fun now in retrospect. But my agent was like, Reina, this could be the difference between selling 10,000 copies and selling like 50,000 copies. So I was like, oh, wow, OK. So so I let them I let them have their way. It's so iconic now. Yeah. Well, now kids are like, why is there an emoji on your cover? And I'm like, emojis didn't even exist, you guys, when this book was being created. I invented this thing. I used one super iconic photograph from the Vietnam War with a called Saigon execution, the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of like South Vietnamese general shooting of Viet Cong prisoner. So I knew that had had been used as propaganda. And it meant different things to different people. So I just talked about it in the book. I had the characters like, trying to figure out what this image meant to them from their own perspective. And you as the reader just witnessed that. So it was my way of like dealing with the multiple meanings of images just in a really direct way, I guess. And then as far as like how I chose to represent Vietnamese people, there were certain stereotypes that I wanted to not use so much. So like the overused peasant with the cone hat. Like I used that very, very sparingly. I actually think about this. I mean, I definitely like to take different tropes and kind of play with them. And I think that can be powerful if you do it consciously. I think about it the most actually when I do my porn work. And because so much of erotica tends to be kind of cliched tropes and I really think it's incredibly important political thing to do to make one's own porn. And at some point in every semester, I come in with a big stack of erotic comics and I kind of slam it down on the table and tell my students like, OK, sex and desire and sexuality is as important as birth and death. And it's one of the grand mysteries and profundities of the human existence. And you should make great art about it. Don't make crappy art about it. Make great art about it. And especially for queers, women, people of color, but anybody, don't let anyone else colonize your sexual experience. Go out and make your own erotica and trust me, people will love you for it. Someone will find common ground in that and make it personal and make it powerful and think about what that means. So that's that's specifically the genre in which I think about it oftentimes. Yeah. Mike's coming at you. There you go. Thank you. This is really directed at Reyna. There's been some chatter about ghosts. And I just wondered what you have to say about it. I happen to like it very much. But I am not of the ethnicity or nationality or what have you. So I may be looking at it the wrong way. But what's that been like for you? Yeah. No, this is this is something that's been talked about by a lot of people in the last I guess six months in the book since the book was published. And I'm not sure how much context I should give here. Or if you wanted to do that. OK. Wow. Yeah. How exactly to say this as carefully and delicately as possible. I'm not Mexican. I'm not Mexican American. I'm not half Mexican. But the characters in the story are. And so there has been question as to whether it is OK for me to write outside of my race. And yeah, I'm like shaking while I'm talking about this because it's something I've been thinking about really deeply. And it's it's it's there's a lot of different thoughts that I have about it. There's a lot of different justifications and reasons. The only thing I can really say and I say this sort of in a personal context is that I was married to a Mexican or a Latin American family for a long time. So I was I was seeing their culture for 13 years and talking with relatives and talking with lots of different people about their experiences. And so that's not to say that it's my culture, but it was something I was very connected to for a long time. And yeah. So I didn't think I was borrowing it. I thought I was experiencing something on a personal level and then sharing stories. Right. And I've. It's very difficult and I'm not really allowed to talk about the fact that I'm going through a divorce right now. But that is the case. So. And it's OK. Yeah. And to interject for some of you who aren't as familiar as what we're talking about. Jack and I were just actually talking about this last night like this is why we need more diversity just overall in publishing is because when there are these unique stories presented, they're highly criticized because there's no other voices telling these stories. And so it's really easy for when there's one example of it for it to be picked apart because it can't be everything to everyone. In our resource guide, we cite Reading While White, which is an amazing blog that you should be following anyway. And they had a really particular beautiful piece on Ghosts where the author talked about her experience growing up with a very traditional family because the book talks a lot about Dia de Los Mercos, which probably most of you are familiar with as San Francisco Bay Area people who exist in the world. And it also deals a lot with California missions. And I know of myself as a native Californian like the things that were taught about California missions and the things that we were not taught about California missions are huge. And I think that's an important aspect of Ghosts and it was criticized in part because of how it depicted the missions because there are Ghosts at the missions. But I don't know of an editor who's working in publishing that would have that kind of experience to question what we were taught as fourth graders. I mean, how many of you are Californians who built a little mission when you were in fourth grade? You know what, my class actually didn't do that project. You didn't? Oh, I told you. We studied the Mewalk Indians instead. Oh, we have to share the barrier. I think those were the two options, yeah. So that's what we learned in fourth grade. Yeah, I mean. And I don't have any, this is again where I feel like my words, I have to really carefully weigh them. It was an oversight and I think I need to take responsibility for that. But it was not something that was flagged or brought up by a single reader. And I had several of them. Yeah, and I think that goes back to the fact that it's all the readers and the reviewers are almost exclusively white. So we like don't have that same experience to catch it unless it's a mass. I mean, I can't remember what your printing was for Ghosts, but it was a huge printing. It was big. Yeah. So then when it came out and then it was it's already a done deal. But then it was fairly criticized for some things. But the way the process worked to get it to print failed to catch those those things ahead of time. And the reading while white blog that I'm specifically referring to, the woman who wrote it had grown up in a very traditional Mexican family who had a very religious approach or experience with Dia de los Martos versus the more American like it's different things to different people. And so she wrote very articulately about how like her grandmother would have been appalled. But her other experience with other family members legitimized it in different ways. So it's it's a big concept that means a lot of different things, a lot of different people. And and so it's very complicated. Yeah, like you have you have the one you have the one comic that that that touches on that subject. And when people are reading it, they're not just thinking about how how it's how it's treating that subject, but also like there's that level that's like this might be the only time people ever hear about this topic. So it gives it all of this weight that that that might if that weight wasn't on it, it might change the conversation. It might, you know, you might be able to read it and say, oh, this is one interpretation of this as opposed to this might be the only time this kid in Kansas ever sees this subject being taught. Especially California mission, which is such a neatly like California thing. And it's clear if you've read ghost that it's a very personal story that is also has this more the setting that that impacts other people in deeper ways. I think it's complicated to because there is the book that you write and then there is the conversation that happens around it. Right. And I think it's interesting because so I personally in comics, someone had this article recently where they were like talking about Asian writers who write about white people and they said, well, like, look, here's this book this one summer that doesn't include any Asian characters in it. And it's written by two Japanese Canadian people, which we were like, what are you talking about? First of all, if you look at the book, the dad is Asian. But I think that there was this kind of there's this kind of academic reading of that happens, which is kind of feels as from a writer's perspective, sometimes kind of divorced from the story. And it is hard sometimes to sort of think of the sort of larger conversation that's going to happen around your book while you're trying to write a book. And I, for example, like I came from a very specific experience of Toronto. I went to this all girls private school where I was part of the minority posse where there was like 12 of us. And we were like the not white people in the school. And so I have this vision of high schools as being mostly white. And so then when I started writing, you know, in like Oakland, I looked around and I was like, it's very different here. I guess I'm going to have to do some research. And I had conversations with people about, you know, like the racial makeup or the cultural makeup in your books. And people will say, like people have said to me like, how come these characters don't appear in your books? Like saving Montgomery's soul. Like how come it's about, you know, two white people and a person who's First Nations. And it's like, well, that's what I came up with. That's the story that made sense to me. But I can see, I understand, and I do take into consideration that larger conversation of like what other people are, especially when you're writing for kids, what other people are reading into your books. But I mean, it feels lame to say, but it's complicated. Like it's also a conversation with your editor and a conversation with your publisher. And that's not to say, like I fully, when I first started writing this one comic book series, I was really afraid that I was going to say or do something racist. And so I made a list of all the things that I would not do, which I conceived to be racist. And then I thought, what if that list isn't exhaustive? What if someone comes up to me and says, well, this is something that is upsetting to us or racist that I didn't know was. And then I thought, OK, well, then I'll say thank you for letting me know. And I will endeavor to make sure that moving forward, that I take that into consideration. Like it is a process of evolving as you go along. I also think there's something really dangerous here potentially where I mean, I think two things need to happen that we need to absolutely support marginalized voices to create their own narratives. Like absolutely. That's first and foremost. But then also we need to have space for all creators to be able to write outside of their own identities. Because as a cisgender white middle-aged man, I don't want to write stories just about people like me. So I feel very, very passionately about that. I mean, I don't want to be a creator in a world in which I can't write beyond my own experience. You have to do the research, of course. But this idea of siloing creators into specific narratives I think is really dangerous. And sometimes there's not as much literature out there as you would like on a subject. So I mean, I did a ton of research for ghosts. Maybe I should have published the bibliography. That's really all I can say. But it wasn't a large one. So when people said, you should have read this book. You should have read this book, I was like, believe me. I wish I knew about that book. I wish that book had been available to me, but it was not. And I'm really, I'm happy to talk to anybody about this privately, but it's been something I've had to wait for specific reasons to discuss publicly. Yeah, I also like I, there are certain stories I wouldn't write because I don't feel like I know enough about it. And I don't feel like I could do research that I would know enough about it. Like I feel like there was a huge controversy in Canada recently where someone suggested that there should be an appropriation prize. And obviously that did not go over well. Yes, exactly. So that happened. But I think that one of the things that did come out of that was a really great conversation for people about like what voices you want to hear out there as a writer and as a reader and how we can celebrate those voices and how can we can, you know, like it should be a huge impetus to publishers. Like that's the thing, right? It should be a huge impetus to publishers to say, we need to find more writers. And, you know, like because the idea that they're just not there and that's why they haven't been published is false, right? We all know this. This is true. So so, yes. Also, comics take like five years to make some time. So when people say we need diverse books, it's like we might get diverse books five years from now. Well, look what happened, like the number of female comics when I when you and I were like in 2008, hanging out and the number of female. Like we're going on like on women's comics together. That was always the panel we got asked to do a comic on. There's a women's comics panel. And we'd be like, I've been on the tampon panel many a time. But I think it would like to be a lady making comics. Right. But then I was talking to someone who was teaching at SVA and they were saying the number of kids like who are learning comics who are in these classes now, the like 80 percent women are taking these classes. And the number of women publishing comics when I started publishing comics in 2008 versus now, which is not a huge amount of time like eight years. When I was at SVA? More than that. Yeah, like it's nine years, whatever it was. I can't do math. It's a comics panel. It's math panel. Yeah. I was in a comics class with, I think it was 25 students. It was me and one other girl. Oh, my God. So most of our students are women. Yeah. Yeah. And a huge number of queers and people of color. And yeah. Awesome. I mean, it's such a complicated topic. I will say that like, I think we all want the same changes in the industry. But how we get there has to, I don't know, need some massaging. I'm not a fan of the call out culture because I do think that it makes people just freaked out. But I think that like, you also have to listen to people who are angry because they feel like they have to be angry in order to be heard, to make changes. I think like one, like one suggestion I would give to authors when they're thinking about like telling stories from marginalized places is whether they're the right author for it, or whether they could maybe help somebody from that community tell their story. So like using their author voice differently. So just, I don't know, branching out to include more voices is sometimes better than always being the author. I don't know. Yeah, for sure. We're over on time. So we're going to have to wrap things up. I have one more question for the panel. First, I just want to thank everybody for coming. And remind everybody. So Leif, can you wave for us? So Leif is a comics retailer. He owns Mission Comics and Art, which is on the mission like between the two Mission Bart Stops. He has a big stack of books written by these people. If you stop by his table and give him money, he'll give you books. And then you can go out the door and you can get your books signed by our creators. You signed up for that where you know you did. OK, Rico, you said something about celebrating voices. And I thought it might be nice just to wrap the panel up. Just really quickly go down the line and what is a voice in comics that you would like to celebrate? Who's a creator that you think is doing amazing work that should be getting more attention right now? And you can't say yourself. I would never say myself. What? OK, I have to think. Ask someone else. I have to think for a second. Damn it. Why am I first? Graphics just published a book called Newsprints by Ruzu. She's like 23 years old. And she's kind of like and she was like an amazing web comics prodigy from the time she was 13 years old. And it's about a girl who's a news boy in a fantasy world. Yeah. I'm recommending The Flintstones Comic, which is a weird recommend coming from me, who is not a Hennan Barbera person. But it is and I can never remember the artist. And the next time I recommend this, I'm going to find out the name of the artist and the writer. It is the most like politically interesting version of the Flintstones you could ever find. It's like gay marriage, PTSD, everything you're like, what? They're talking about it. It's super great. And also Fred Flintstone is weirdly attractive. Super hot, super hot. That's not a yeah. And it's a voice I'm celebrating because I think it's it's great to to do any kind of undermining of what of expectation. So that's my recommend. There's a professor at Mills College named Awan Mance. I was going to do both. We could both sing her phrases. I met her about a year ago. I've been a fan of her work from afar for a while. She just finished a project called A Thousand and One Black Men, where there are just these beautiful portraits of different men that she talks to. Some of those portraits are actually going to be on display at the Berkeley Public Library starting like next month. So we're all Awan Mance fans. She has these zines called Gender Studies and they're not like Gender Studies sounds so like serious and academic, but they're the exact opposite. They're just about her like casual stories about like growing up queer and black and their stories about hair. We're talking to her niece about like whether she's a boy or a girl. And they're just so like charming and disarming and like they really show her like educator side that doesn't mind explaining, you know, stuff that she should not have to explain to people, but she does anyway. So I just find her to be like just this amazing person that I want to follow around and whatever she makes I will read and whatever she says I will listen to you because I feel like it makes me like a better person. Yeah, I second that. So we just we did this Queers in Comics conference at CCA a month or so ago. And Mariko was one of the guest speakers, the keynote speakers. The other keynote speaker was a guy named Gengor Tagame, who is considered the kind of great gay komi artist out of Japan. And his work is amazing. His pornographic work is incredible, but he also just came out with my brother's husband, which is the first kind of literary graphic novel, really queer graphic novel in some ways and gay graphic novel in Japan. And it's kind of about a family dynamic. So I highly recommend looking at checking out his work. Thank you, everybody. Thank you to Baynett for hosting this event today. Thank you to everybody for your attention and your interesting questions and your interest in this topic.