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by Wendy Xu
so the official launch date of Secret Identities is rapidly
coming upon us (remember, remember, the 5th of November, woooo!)
although you can still pick up an early copy if you’re in the NYC area
and get to visit the Museum of Chinese in America, which I highly
suggest doing. Right now through February they have an amazing API
comics exhibit up featuring work by fine folks like my dear friend Alice Meichi Li
and people I have had the great pleasure and privilege of paneling
with, like Larry Hama and GB Tran, all of whom also contributed to SI!I was approached by Keith at the beginning of the summer and asked to contribute to the book. I almost could not believe that I was going to be in a real published anthology and consequently sat on the news for months, although I was dying to tell everyone (and now all of you have to get flooded with news about this, muwahaha). but I cannot even begin to describe how huge of an honor this is for me.
I’ve been drawing since I was a kid. actually, when I started at NYU
I’d started out in the psychology program with the goal of becoming a
therapist (L O L HOW MINDS CHANGE) and then realized it was really not
for me. but by then it was too late to change majors since I’d dived
right in, so I just rode out the program, which I finished early, and
turned my goal elsewhere, and in my sophomore year of college really got
into drawing comics. I started Angry Girl in a very transitional and
turbulent summer between my junior year and the start of my last
semester and it has taken me further than I ever could have imagined.for the anthology I drew a two-page thank-you comic for Dr. Jan and Marica Vilcek, founders of the Vilcek Foundation, an organization that gives grants to immigrants working in the arts and sciences. The Vilceks themselves are immigrants, having left Czechoslovakia for the States in the sixties and becoming superstars in their respective fields of medical research and art history. The comic was written by Jeff Yang, one of our editors for the anthology.
