08 Nov Next up on visualizAsian: Meet Jeff Yang, editor of “Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology” & Bernard Chang, “Superman” artist

visualizAsian is back for November with a killer fun live conversation, an hour with Jeff Yang and Bernard Chang on the role of superheroes and comics, and why there aren’t many Asian American superheroes.

The chat will be Tuesday, Nov. 16 at 7 pm PT, 10 pm ET, and if you haven’t registered for a visualizAsian call before, you can sign up in a jiffy.

These two guys are eminently qualified to speak about Asian Americans as well as comic books and superheroes:

Jeff Yang is the Asian Pop columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and one of the leading lights of Asian American pop culturedom. We’ve run into him at AAJA conventions, where he’s moderated panels galore over the years. He’s been on the forefront of Asian American pop for years. We first knew his name as the editor of the gone-but-not-forgotten pioneering AsianAm publication, A magazine. He’s also written pop culture compendiums that are musts in every AsianAm library (Eastern Standard Time is one). His latest project, as editor-in-chief of “Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology” is so cool he and his crew of co-editors, writers and artists are getting to do a second volume.

Bernard Chang is one of a handful of notable Asian American artists working in comic books. He’s worked on both Marvel and DC superheroes, and he’s currently one of the artists drawing the most venerable superhero of them all, Superman.

Here’s Jeff’s online bio from the Secret Identities website:

A self-acknowledged geek of all trades, Jeff Yang began reading comics with the venerable “G.I. Joe” series created by Larry Hama, and quickly moved on to the stories of men (and women) in tights made available by the twin titans, DC and Marvel. He became a “double-buy” guy in high school, purchasing two copies of particularly collectible issues—one for reading, one for storing away mint. Although the discovery of girls led to a brief comics-free interlude his senior year, he reconnected with comics during college, and has never been unfaithful again.

Yang founded and was editor and publisher of the pioneering Asian American periodical aMagazine for over a dozen years. He has written for a wide range of publications, from Spin to Vibe to Mademoiselle, and has been a columnist and featured contributor for the Village Voice, the anime/manga magazine Animerica, and the comics and gaming magazine Flux, as well as SFGate, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle, where he currently writes the biweekly column “Asian Pop.”

He has also written three books—”Eastern Standard Time” (Houghton Mifflin); “I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action” (Ballantine, the action icon’s official autobiography); and “Once Upon a Time in China” (Atria/Pocket Books)—and can be seen on VH1 and heard as a special correspondent on New York’s flagship NPR station, WNYC.

Somewhere along the line, he managed to convince the former Ms. Heather Ying to marry him. She does not hyphenate her name. Heather and Jeff have two sons: five-year-old Hudson and one-year-old Skyler.

Here’s Bernard’s bio, from Wikipedia and his website:

Bernard Chang is an artist working in comics and in entertainment design. He attended the Pratt Institute in New York to study architecture and began drawing professionally in 1992. He drew titles like ‘The Second Life of Dr. Mirage’ and ‘Archer & Armstrong’ for Valiant Comics, before moving over to Marvel and DC. His credits include ‘X-Men’, ‘New Mutants’, ‘Cable’, ‘Deadpool’ and ‘Superman Plus’.

Chang is also known for his illustrations outside of the comic-book world. He was a concept designer for Walt Disney Imagineering between 1997 and 2001 and additionally worked for several museums and redevelopment projects. In 2005 he worked with author Dawn Barnes on the children’s graphic novel ‘The Black Belt Club’ for Scholastic Press. He also illustrated Neil Strauss’s “Emergency,” a book about how to survive the apocalypse, and another Strauss book, “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.” He also worked on porn star Jenna Jameson’s autobiography.

He was also the captain of Pratt Institute’s men’s basketball team, and was projected to be a late third round pick in the 1995 NBA draft, except his art career took off.

This is going to be a fun conversation, so don’t miss it!

(This is cross-posted from visualizAsian.com!)