Boston Globe - 1/23/05

Secret Asian Man older, wiser
Angry comic strip character evolves
By Susanna Baird, Globe Correspondent

Secret Asian Man is rather boyish, with a black thatch of hair and thick, black, brush-drawn dashes for eyebrows. His creator, comic-strip artist and Savin Hill resident Tak Toyoshima, is also rather boyish, with black hair and more mundane eyebrows. Toyoshima, art director at Boston's alternative paper Weekly Dig, comes off as a polite and friendly artistic guy. Secret Asian Man, appearing weekly in the comic section of newspapers nationwide, can come off as, well, irate. To say the least.

Case in point. After the recent tsunami and earthquake, Secret Asian Man went on a rant.

"I can't remember the last time I saw so many Asian faces in American media," he began. "Too bad they are all deceased, sick, dying, homeless and/or starving. Where are the dead white people? Why only show piles of dead brown children? After 9/11, I don't remember seeing any dead American bodies on TV."

Dagwood he isn't. Secret Asian Man, S.A.M., doesn't bumble, he doesn't dither, he doesn't beat around the bush, and he doesn't live in a comic land of make-believes. He lives in our country and in your face. And people like him that way. What began as a weekly appearance in the defunct Shovel, a monthly arts magazine, is now a comic strip carried to a half-million readers across the country, in major alternative weeklies such as Silicon Valley's Metro and Chicago's RedEye. This forthright little guy is becoming something of a phenomenon, showing up in galleries and on college syllabi, and he's taking creator Toyoshima along for the ride.

The young S.A.M., born in 1999, was even louder than he is today, bluntly commenting on hot-button topics such as race. He railed, as he still does, about the lack of Asian-Americans on television. He tried out for MTV's "The Real World" and was laughed out of the audition. He was outspoken, with a penchant for cursing. Toyoshima was drawing for a fight. "I was definitely trying to get a reaction." He did.

"I was getting a lot of hate mail, so I started thinking maybe I need to give people more history, background of where I'm coming from." Thus began "Origins," a serialized comic-strip version of Toyoshima's coming-of-age at the corner of Manhattan's Canal and Broadway, at the worlds-colliding intersection of Little Italy and Chinatown, Tribeca and Soho.

Toyoshima was born in 1971 to Japanese beatniks, a bell-bottomed clothing designer and her neo-Dadaist husband, who arrived in America seeking New York's avant-garde embrace. He developed a sense of his racial identity -- a topic that preoccupies Secret Asian Man -- at his Chinatown elementary school. The epiphany, as presented in the strip: "Suddenly it hit me. I was surrounded by kids who looked exactly like me. But they spoke differently. They were all Chinese." Toyoshima gravitated toward the outsiders. So did the characters in his strip.

Toyoshima's shadow biography continued for a year, as the strip followed Secret Asian Man from Stuyvesant High School to Boston University. After college, Toyoshima taught at a Cambridge preschool and self-published a "make-at-Kinko's kind of thing called 'The Couch.' " New England Comics' George Suarez liked it and offered Toyoshima a job working for The Tick, a comic strip. He joined the crew drawing the brawny blue buggy superhero.

He stepped out into the comic sunlight. "I started touring around at big comic shows . . . and got a little taste of what it was like to have people line up and ask for autographs." The taste was sweet, but Toyoshima knew the crowds were there for The Tick, not him. It was time for S.A.M.

Origins stopped at the comic strip's inception and at Toyoshima's job at the Weekly Dig. The series ended. The strip veered off the chronological track, and Secret Asian Man returned to his ranting, and raving, and provoking. People liked it. Other papers picked it up. There were fans. They responded. They said they respected him. They said they felt less alone.

Also, people didn't like it. They said Toyoshima didn't know what he was talking about. They said he was stupid. "One that completely blew my mind," Toyoshima remembers, said, "I'm part of the Asian-whatever association, and I'm going to come down there" and kick him in the rear. (He didn't.)

"Those of us in the alternative press, we don't care if people like him or not," says Dan Pulcrano, editor of Silicon Valley's Metro. "The last thing a socially relevant cartoonist should be is safe."

One of Secret Asian Man's unsafest moments came just after 9/11.

"I grew up right near there, and so my parents were dealing with all that dust," Toyoshima says. "My nephew's mom was working on one of those towers. I remember calling, very involved. There was definitely that confusion that everybody had at that period." He took a look around. "The images that I kept getting hit with were, God Bless America, God Bless America, God Bless America." Toyoshima knew what he felt like saying. So Secret Asian Man said it; he cursed God in the strip as profanely as he could. Threats were made. Papers were dumped. Advertisers departed. Toyoshima heard the threats, but he also heard something else. "People were reading it. It's getting out there."

In an online interview, Toyoshima says the strip got "less brutal" after 9/11. Today, he says "I don't have to curse to get this point across. I'm getting better at making my point." That point is still, well, pointy. But S.A.M.'s reactions are more measured.

Take a more recent strip, life-inspired. Toyoshima was walking by a group of youths in Dorchester. They called him an ethnic slur. Next strip, Secret Asian Man is called the same. He's really mad. He thinks about violence. But then he thinks about his wife and his baby at home. He walks away.

Secret Asian Man is a little older and wiser, not only because Toyoshima is older and wiser, but also because Toyoshima thinks Secret Asian Man might be around for a long time, something bigger than the random rant or prod. He might be the work of a lifetime.

"My dad is very into the idea of a life work, being able to look years back and see a progression and learn from your own work," says Toyoshima. "Maybe that's what's starting to happen. I'm starting to process that." So are a lot of other people; S.A.M. has his own show at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, through the end of the month.

Toyoshima likes the buzz. Buzz means people are reading. As long as people are reading, and thinking about what they're reading, he and Secret Asian Man are doing their jobs.