Giant Robot Magazine Celebrates 10-Year Anniversary
Nguoi Viet 2, Commentary, Andrew Lam, Posted: Nov 13, 2004
GR is 10 years old and growing.
One recent morning at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., a young woman with bright pink hair sauntered up to me and exclaimed: "Giant Robot! God, I'm such a fan!"
It took me a full second to realize she was looking at my T-shirt emblazoned with the letters GR on it. I had put that shirt on in San Francisco before I hopped on the plane, but I hadn't expected GR fans this far east of California.
Before I could ask why she was a fan, she volunteered. "This zine has 'tude," she said. "It's unpredictable. It's real, you know." Then she was gone, swept up by the rushing crowd, and I could only nod in agreement.
So what's Giant Robot?
To say Giant Robot is a magazine about Asian pop culture is like saying Rolling Stone is a magazine about American music, which is to say, not to reveal very much. Professionally speaking, I read GR because as a journalist who covers East-West relations, I find GR resource-rich and always at the cutting edge about what's new and exciting from Asia. Personally, however, I read GR because, well, it rocks.
It has been my observation of English language magazines produced by Asian Americans that many of these glossy magazines seem to come from a vantage point of the anguished: They tend to labor the points that to me have always been either too obvious or a little forced and predictable. The gist of what they say is: look, we are Asians living in America, and we're hip and hot and sexy, and we have talents, wealth and glamour to boot.
Giant Robot, on the other hand, advances none of those points. The brainchild of Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong -- two self-described Asian American punks who grew up in Los Angeles with kung fu, anime, punk rock and comic books -- the quarterly, which started in 1994 as a zine, seems to reflect their quirky personalities and grab-bag fascination with East Asian cultures and beyond.
That their zine not only lasted for a decade but has turned into a glossy quarterly and spawned an art gallery and three merchandise stores (including one in the Haight) -- not to mention a very popular Web site where fans constantly yak it up in their chat room (www.giantrobot.com) -- is a testimony to its popularity and staying power. GR readership can be as far flung as Shanghai and Berlin.
"Giant Robot came about from my liking of giant robots," confessed Nakamura, who has a degree in East Asian Studies from UCLA. "I collect robot toys and feel that it's a large part of Japanese culture. It comes from postwar needs of a savior in the '60s, while Japan's economy was still at a low. So robots in Japan are huge and fight crime, but they're also controlled by humans. I think Giant Robot, the magazine, is sort of like a Japanese robot. It's a lot larger than us, but we control the contents and guide its direction."
Nakamura's take has got to be one of the most offbeat synopses of a magazine, but hey, it works for me. Still, GR is more than that. From promoting martial arts star Jet Li long before he was well known in the United States to doing articles on tofu-head dolls from Japan, from exploring the rather guileless yet eye-catching drawings on medicine bottles in Cambodia to a serious retrospective look at Chinese propaganda art during the cultural revolution, from reviewing the latest animes that hit the United States to humorously comparing the variety of Asian candies and ramen noodles, the quarterly is quirky and always a fun read.
Christine Wong, a graphic artist and illustrator in San Francisco, is a GR fan. "Though I'd love a good Asian American lifestyle mag, I don't relate to upwardly-mobile, mainstream, 'beautiful people' phoniness. I think GR is the first mag that doesn't feel like a marketing gimmick, like an Asian version of Vogue or something," she said. "GR's zine origins still show in its attitude."
She added, "I think they've been successful because GR is interesting for both Asians and non-Asians. And they're able to appeal to multiple subcultures: collectors, underground musicians, artists, movie fans, and of course fans of Asian pop culture." Plus, she said, GR is one of the best illustrated magazines out there and has an amusement and insatiable wonder for cultural phenomena.
GR also happens to be one of the best art-directed magazines on the rack today. Its cover constantly amazes with its childlike fascination with the world. Snoopy stood on the cover one issue, martial arts Shaolin monks posing on ancient stone steps the next.
Open it up and, anyone who ever lived under the tidal-wave cultural forces in this global age will recognize something of themselves in it: If he ever played a street fighter video game or loved "Speed Racer" cartoons as a kid or was a fan of Bruce Lee, he will see that old passion reflected in GR.
Wong, the other GR editor, said that he and Nakamura started out doing a zine that did not cater to Asians but more likely to themselves. "As far as our chronicling Asian culture, we don't consider it our job to document everything Asian. We pick and choose what interests us. Some of it is new, like the current wave of toymakers in Japan and Hong Kong, but other subjects are quite old. We've written about World War II propaganda comics and orchid freaks. We try to build up our own aesthetic rather than reflect what's hot."
Yet Wong also admitted that "it's getting harder to say that something is 'ethnic.' What is private and subculture yesterday is today's cultural phenomenon for all: Think sushi and acupuncture and Jackie Chan. But there's still stuff that hasn't crossed over to mainstream, and this is where GR finds its strength," he said.
Like what? "Chicken feet and stinky tofu," he said. "One of the things that really interests me is how things that have been appropriated in Asia come back to the West. For example, a Japanese band like Guitar Wolf has taken rock 'n' roll and distilled it into something that's a thousand times more potent than the crappy rap, rock bands and fake punk groups that dominate the U.S. airwaves."
Given an Asia that's growing at a phenomenal rate and a Giant Robot playing the cultural bridge across the Pacific, I can easily see another 10 years of delight for fans of the zine with 'tude.
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