They look at adoption as being part of an involuntary lottery, and they happened to hit winning numbers and wind up in god, loving homes. Another point about the characters being adopted: I have friends who were adopted into their families (and know) and many are incredibly grateful for it. They come by it honestly enough they’re adopted into a family that finds its ethics, values and belief systems in Bushido, much like the way Christian parents take their children to church to learn their ethics, values and belief systems. The adoption of culture in this instance is both literal and figurative. She makes high-fashion kimonos as a designer and makes katanas as a hobby. Ben’s a modern-day samurai for all intents and purposes, a retired SOCOM operator who cherishes his adopted family’s history. The comic’s imagery and plot centring around non-Asians steeped in samurai culture is deliberate. Again, it goes back to that idea of globalization vs.
Mind you, she wasn’t thrilled that Zoe was white, but she appreciated the badassery.ĪP2HYC: What inspired you to make a comic about a family with adopted and biological children? Mind blown.) When she read the book, she immediately recognized Zoe’s origin. (She got me a copy of Akira when I was 13. Also, she was my introduction into Japanese animation when I was a teen, like, beyond Voltron and G-Force. Second, she collects swords I just bought her a naginata for her birthday.
I love her to death, but I would never want to cross her. The relationship between Zoe and Teron is practically the one I have with my sister. T’s the youngest of the four, same as me. But the character closest to me in terms of my family is Teron. Jeffers: I’d say most of the characters come from different aspects of my personality.
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The family drama part, again, comes from my family and what we were dealing with and the idea that, while we know how to push each other’s buttons, we always come together in times of upheaval and crisis.ĪP2HYC: Is there any character in the comic that you relate to or is inspired by you personally? We didn’t fulfil the request, but the idea fired a shit-ton of synapses in my head. I got a letter for a reader asking us to turn her into, yup, a samurai. Like, “I want to become a singer” or “I want to learn to ride a skateboard.” And if the request wasn’t too crazy, we’d help them do it. I worked for a features section focused on leisure and entertainment called “At Play”, and we were running a contest where we asked readers what they wanted to be. Probably the samurai part because the “in” or “aha moment” or spark (whatever you want to call it) came while I was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. That’s just raw, fun stuff.ĪP2HYC: Which part of the comic came first, the samurai part or the family drama part? Jeffers: Kurosawa‘s Seven Samurai and Mizoguchi‘s 47 Ronin immediately come to mind, but my current favourite is Takashi Miike‘s 13 Assassins. So, again, it’s more about, “Okay, we’re trying to tell an East-West story, and we’re utilising various aspects of Japanese culture to tell that story, but what are we saying about how those two cultures are blended together? Is one usurping the other? Is Japanese culture a playground for non-Asians to frolic?”ĪP2HYC: What is your favourite samurai story? A comic, book or film perhaps? 2) They both deal with non-Asians steeped in Japanese culture as the main characters: Sean Connery‘s John Connor and Dolph Lundgren‘s Chris Kenner. These worked for a few reasons: 1) I am a sucker for late 80s/early 90s American action films, which is kinda the tone of the book. But the other two are a bit older and somewhat obscure: Rising Sunand Showdown in Little Tokyo. 1 and the fight between the Bride and the Crazy 88. The rest just worked toward filling in the characters and plot.ĪP2HYC: Were there any films or comics that inspired your comic? But ultimately, it boils down to this: I wanted to write a comic book with swordplay and gun fights.
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I started to wonder if the way America has co-opted much of Japanese pop/geek culture into our own ( Sailor Moon, Pokemon, animation styles ranging from Avatar and Korra to Code Lyoko, Ken Watanabe voicing a Samurai-looking Autobot in the last two Transformers movies) had moved past Friedman’s ideology and more toward cultural appropriation, which tracks along Kijiro’s motivations in the book. At the same time, journalist Thomas Friedman‘s ideas on globalisation (merging of markets, technology, communications, etc.) were swirling around my head. Glenn Jeffers: At the time I wrote Children of Saigo, I was dealing with a couple of things, most notably my mother’s death from cancer and our family’s response to that. A Place To Hang Your Cape: What drew you to making a modern-day samurai story?
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