Posted in: Comics | Tagged: boom, boom studios, greg pak, mech cadet yu, Takeshi Miyazawa

Amadeus Cho Creators Greg Pak And Takeshi Miyazawa Team-Up Once More For 'Mech Cadet Yu' At BOOM!

Published Mon, 15 May 2017 15:43:10 -0500

Just for clarification, that headline isn't meant to be read as shouting. BOOM! Studios' official styling is an all capitalized BOOM with an exclamation point, and if you don't do it that way, they're liable to send you a sternly worded email about it. What were we talking about again?

Oh yes. The creative team of Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa are teaming up once again for a new comic series, Mech Cadet Yu, at BOOM! Studios. Out in August, the comic is set in a world where Sky Corps Academy cadets bond with giant robots to fight aliens, and the story centers around Stanford Yu, who is not a cadet, but the son of a janitor at the Academy, who happens to bond with one of the robots. Now, you're probably saying right now, "no need to tell us anything more" and placing the series on your preorder list, but Comic Book Resources scored an EXCLUSIVE interview with the team to promote the book, which we've selflessly extracted details and quotes of to fill space in our article.

Pak says that Mech Cadet Yu is based on a short story made for the Shattered anthology called Los Robos, Arizona. He says it's an all ages series, noting that it will be "totally appropriate for kids but entirely enjoyable and emotionally compelling for adults as well." Miyazawa says he's redesigned the robots from the original story.

Pak is also asked in the interview about Asian-American representation, responding:

It's hugely important to me. I've thought a lot about it in terms of this particular genre, as well. We've seen tons of robot stories from Asia and a bunch of robot stories from America. It's a genre that's hugely important to a lot of Asian Americans, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many stories like this that actually star Asian Americans. So, I started thinking about the interesting ways this could play out with specifically Asian-American characters and got very excited.

I'm also excited about writing a story that specifically features kids who are Asian-American heroes. Studies of children's literature have shown a really astounding lack of diversity among lead characters. I've had Asian-American kids come up to me at cons with big stacks of Amadeus Cho comics for me to sign and it honestly makes me choke up. Kids need and deserve to see faces like theirs in the stories they read so they can be affirmed that they do indeed belong, that they have all the value of everyone else in this world. And just as importantly, kids need and deserve to see heroes with faces different from theirs in the stories they read so they can learn empathy and expand their view of who belongs and has value. I want as many kids as possible to read this book for both of those reasons.

Check out the full interview at CBR, and look for Mech Cadet Yu in stores in August.

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