Filipinos have been in the United States for longer than the country is old. As far back as 1763, sailors from the Philippines started arriving in the Gulf of Mexico as indentured servants on Spanish galleons. Life on board was so brutal that, at the sight of land, some jumped ship. These “Manilamen” ultimately set up fishing villages in the bayous of Louisiana and, under the command of Andrew Jackson decades later, joined forces with Jean Lafitte to defend New Orleans. These early Filipinos helped defeat the British in the War of 1812. But their story—like many of the ways in which Asians contributed to this country from its earliest days—is often unknown, even to Asian Americans. It’s a gap that Amy Chu (MBA 1999) aims to fill with a new set of graphic novels called Fighting to Belong!

Chu has made a name for herself as a comic-book writer for Marvel and DC, penning stories for Wonder Woman, Deadpool, Red Sonja, and Poison Ivy. But Fighting to Belong! departs from that mold. The three graphic novels, which Chu cowrote with her son, Alexander Chang, cover the sweep of American history, with a curriculum guide that educators can incorporate into classroom work. Chu met with the Bulletin to talk about this latest project. In the conversation excerpted here, she discusses her own character arc, the particular superpower of the graphic novel, and why comic-book writing is more nuanced than one might assume.

This is a bit of a departure from your comic-book work. How did you get here?

It’s different from most of what I’m known for, but I did a lot of nonprofit work and was very active in Asian-American activism before I started doing the mainstream Marvel and DC work. And going way back, before HBS, I led a group of students at Wellesley College to get Asian-American studies on campus for the first time, back in the 1980s. So, if we’re talking about character arcs, this is kind of the completion of my arc. It just took me a long time.

Many people say, “Oh, my gosh, you must’ve wanted to do this since you were a child,” and I’m like, “No, I never, ever wanted to do this.” I was very happy at business school. I was quite happy doing management consulting. But the difference is finding out that the writers are the ones who control the storylines. The reason a lot of our mainstream pop culture is so dominated by certain stereotypes is honestly because of the people who create that content. Once I realized that I could create content that’s more reflective of what I think my children should be reading, of what we all should be reading—that was the game changer. It’s probably the hardest work I’ve ever done, but it’s also very gratifying.

I remember being at San Diego Comic-Con back in 2015 or 2016, when my career was just starting. I was on an Asian American and Pacific Islander panel, and Filipino American fans there were basically bemoaning the lack of Filipino representation in pop culture and especially in comics. And I thought, This is something I can literally fix. So I created a character—that was Poison Ivy’s mentor. Unfortunately, I had to kill her off later.

Why is this the hardest work you’ve ever done?

People hit me up on email continually, like, “Hey, my buddy would like to try writing comics.” It’s like saying you played baseball as a kid, so you want to try out for the Mets or the Yankees. It’s very difficult and highly competitive. And you do not get paid as well as if you played for the Met or Yankees, by any stretch.

A comic script is really an exercise in strategy because you have to make a lot of very difficult decisions based on economy. An American comic is typically 20 pages, and you don’t want to go above 15 words per balloon, especially for kids. So you’re reducing it to a very limited amount of information, and you also have to infuse it with emotion. The shorter the story, the harder it is to pull off. There are also a lot of little subliminal things that make it work, which is why I’m also quite confident that I’m not going to be replaced by AI. Beyond the character creation, the world creation, there are also the decisions about how many panels to put in the page to make it resonate for people. If you watch shows on Netflix, or movies, or anything, there’s a pacing that occurs. If you don’t get the pacing right, people just don’t like it. It’s the same thing with comics, except that you’re working with even fewer tools. I simply cannot put 12 panels on a page because it takes your eye a certain amount of time to go down the page, and if I get that wrong, it’s just not going to feel right. There’s an art to it.

Chu’s book illustrates how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been part of the fabric of American history from the outset.

And in this latest series, you’re also fitting in American history lessons. How does that change your approach?

The choices of what to represent, and how to do it, were a lot harder. There is a level of pressure to get it right and to also make it interesting so that kids want to read it. It’s even harder because I can’t just make it up, and I can’t embellish either. There was an additional layer because my son, who is 20, is the cowriter of this book. We’ve worked together on other projects, but this is our first graphic novel together, and I took for granted some of the stuff that he simply didn’t know because he’d never been taught it. There’s so much that the education system does not teach about American history in an inclusive way, so it was challenging and fun to work with him on this.

Why is the graphic novel the right medium for this history? What is its superpower?

It can convey a lot of information and emotion that you can’t do as well in prose. So stuff that ends up rendering very dry in a regular textbook, you can actually do more easily with pictures. In this book, we’re covering court cases and things like that. I feel very chuffed that Denny Chin [a senior circuit judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit] sent me a nice email. He said that it’s very tricky to talk about these really important cases in a way that kids or even regular humans want to understand. But it’s super important for us to know about this history, especially in contemporary politics.

I also would mention the importance of collaboration in comics. As the writer, it’s like I’ve created a screenplay, and the real hero here is the artist Louie Chin. He’s one of the first people I met in the business, and I’ve collaborated on and off with him since 2012. Part of being a good writer is writing a script that resonates with the artist so they can draw their best. Louie had to make these super-important decisions, and he had to be very nuanced. When you’re talking about a massacre, for example, how much of it do you want to show kids? And at the same time, you don’t want to not show it. His interpretation of the script worked really well in our favor, but he nails it pretty much every time.

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