Whenever someone tells me an offensive joke about Asians, I look them dead in the eye and inform them that I am 1/3rd Korean.  How a person responds tells me a lot about the person: do they apologize, do they keep joking, do they shake their heads when they realize that a person can’t be 1/3rd anything…that the denominator on ethnicity always needs to be an even number?

But, really, I’m 1/3rd Korean, 4/5ths Puerto Rican, and 1/7th Cherokee Princess.

SIx years ago, I moved back to Boston, after having lived six months in Mesa Arizona, which I do not recommend to people who like seasons and/or breathing.  I started picking up our local free alt-weekly paper, The Weekly Dig.  And near the back was a collection of black and white comics that you can find in lots of alt-weeklies: your Ted Rall, your comic about a middle aged woman who likes cats, Keith Urban, and a comic called Secret Asian Man.

Secret Asian Man quickly became the only comic on the page that I read.  Scathing, somewhat controversial, but smartly written.  I was excited to here that the artist/author, Tak Toyoshima, was releasing a collection of his work.  I stopped reading The Dig a couple of years ago, and his comic was the main thing I missed.

What I also missed was that he got picked up by United Features Syndicate in 2007, and put out daily comics until 2009.  They’re fantastic.  Many to most of them focus on the fact that the main character is (shhhhhh….) Asian.

If they have this in your LCS, I highly recommend taking it off the shelf, flipping through it, and seeing if it your cup of nokcha (what?  it’s part of my heritage).