SIUniverse Blog Parade Day Three: Angry Girl Comics

Originally posted at Angry Girl Comics
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 by Wendy Xu

hi friends! I hope all my fellow NYCers survived the hurricane safe and sound. my area of BK was thankfully untouched; I am so freaking grateful to have had power through this whole ordeal.
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.

with that, here are the two pages I’ve done, as well as some preliminary sketches! (edit: okay Tumblr is being stupid, no preliminary sketches. BUT FINISHED ART YAY) They’re lettered in the anthology, but not by myself!

I am insanely pleased and proud to be able to contribute to SI and to be a part of this continually expanding API American comics community. Big thanks to Jeff, Keith, Parry, and everyone else who made publication possible!

Here are some other fine folks who were included in Shattered and wrote about it:
Koji Sakai of 8Asians
Adam WarRock
Jenn Fang of Reappropriate.co, whose post will go up Thursday (but in the meantime, check out all of her other cool articles!)