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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (March 2, 2018)
Page 10 Culture Street Roots • March 2-8, 2018 and machines. What inspired the comic s aesthetic? S.L.: I would consider this bio-punk. It’s P O R TR A IT BY F R A N K , C O U R T E S Y OF S LO A N E LEO N G Sloane Leong is charting a course through the intergalactic world of indigenous science fiction B Y SA RAH H AN SELL S T A F F W R IT E R S lo a n e L e o n g : “Prism Stalker” focuses on Vep, who is a refugee and is forced to live rowing up on Maui with no comic away from her home planet that underwent scene to speak of, Sloane Leong a natural disaster. So a lot of this actually started teaching herself how to reflected back to my ancestral history in create comics at age 12. By age 16 she’d Hawaii, and the interesting, scary, traumatic self-published her first comic, “Crooked politics that involve the overturn of the Root,” a “scary comedic short” about a Hawaiian monarchy, and commercializing bunny and a cyclops. pineapples and other plants too, and how On March 7 she will release her first solo, that affected the native people and also the ongoing, long-form comic, “Prism Stalker,” immigrants that came to an “alien intergalactic work there. space opera” story So I’m blowing up drawn from her that part of Hawaiian owing Bp and seeing ancestral history and history into this alien experiences as a native a ll these Mmerlean w a le s intergalactic space where Itys J bs I lik e teams of Hawaiian. opera. Because it’s not In a comic’s really b u ll molent indes, It really talked about that landscape dominated was pretty stifling« l t rs gnlle much, this sort of quick by white male creators male centric^ it's lik e a beys colonization of people and characters, “Prism and assimilation, in the Stalker” boasts an all sci-fi genre, that’s from feminine cast, and tells the perspective of a the story of a violet native person. haired, brown-skinned refugee struggling to connect with her S.H .: Speaking o f the m ain character, Vep, ancestry while forced to work in the hive of the comic begins really grounded in her her insectoid captors. connection to family, place, language and “Prism Stalker” revolves around themes spirituality, and her forcible displacement from of survival, displacement and identity on the all o f those things. Can you talk about sci-fi surface, but also addresses interesting and and other worlds as the vehicle to explore these relevant topics like the racism in aesthetics. themes that are so relevant and real in our Published by Image Comics, the series is own world? slated for 25 issues. Leong’s next upcoming S.L.: I think the big thing that you’re project, A Map to the Sun, a slice-of-life introduced to in the first issue is the girl’s basketball drama, will come out in language barrier between her and her spring of next year. family. The young people are separated from the elders so that they can more easily S a r a h H a n s e ll: You’ve said that Prism assimilate into this new galactic common Stalker is a very personal story for you. Can tongue and their customs. you talk about how “Prism Stalker” resonates I wanted to use that to drive home how with you or reflects your own experience? G IF Y O U G O What: Prism Stalker Release Party and Signing When: 6-8 p.m. Wednesday, March 7, Where: Floating World Comics, 400 NW Couch St. very into biotechnology and more organic forms of architecture. I guess I was really inspired just by the body, by diseases like cancer and just the idea of the Hayflick limit, and superseding that, being able to encode data into our biology, basically encode any sort of data into our DNA. I think what inspired that was growing up on Maui. It’s one of the most geographically diverse topographies, concentrated into such a tiny place. So being surrounded by oceans, by volcanic desert, forest, jungles, not to mention the aquatic landscapes as well. When you think of sci-fi, you’re going to think of clean white spaceships and smooth angular technology, and there’s hardly any color, it’s maybe blue and white and barely anything else. So I wanted to just counter that. I think there’s also a cultural, I guess it’s a sort of racism, that is tied into really bright colors. In the West, people think it’s tacky — a lot of things, like Mexican folk art, especially in the fine art world. I feel like there’s a lot of racism about aesthetics, so I just wanted to grab hold of that and really dive into it. S.H .: The comics industry has traditionally been dominated by stories by and about white men, and the statistics continue to be extremely skewed. As of autum n 2017, comics historian Tim Hanley reported 15.6 percent o f D C ’s comic creators and 18 percent o f Marvel’s were women. A nd I haven’t even been able to fin d statistics on creators o f color. How has this landscape impacted you as woman o f color comic creator? S.L.: It’s definitely made me want to just crucial language is as a connection to the past, as a way to transmit culture, and also as a way to shape how we think about our environment and the people around us and relationships. Eventually she gets to a place where she can use language to gain some agency, but it’s still shaped by the society and influenced from these people around her. S.H .: In the press release announcing “Prism Stalker,”you described the type of comics you want to create using the term “quantum indigenous futurism . ” Can you explain that to me? S.L.: Everyone uses the term Afrofuturism, and I have to give props to black futurists because they’re always cutting edge in sci-fi. So quantum futurism is for people that are trying to connect with their ancestral past and their future. For me, that’s connecting with my native past, basically my different heritages, but the one that I feel most connected to is my Hawaiian heritage. Just being an indigenous person to Hawaii has a big impact on how I want to tell stories and on who I am as a person. S.H .: The comic is an explosion o f vivid colors and biological details, quite different from what many people think o f with traditional Western sci-fi, with moody lighting really focus on my own experiences. With Prism Stalker the whole cast is female or female presenting, because it’s also a lot of aliens, and the pronoun that everyone uses is “she,” that’s just the neutral pronoun. Growing up and seeing all these American comics where it’s just like teams of really buff violent dudes, it was pretty stifling. It’s quite male centric. It’s like a boys club. I just wanted to have, “oh, this is just all women everywhere.” It’s slowly changing though, with the rise of Kickstarter and Patreon, where women, just non-men, can go and have support from their audiences and make work that way, and they’re just as successful if not more. Recently it’s been really exciting seeing that change, finally. It’s been a long time coming. S.H .: Who do you hope will pick “Prism Stalker” up, what impact do you hope it will have on its readers? S.L.: I think most readers will be able to get something out of it, even if it’s just on the surface, but even the subtext is not very subtext-like. I have a lot of inner dialogue with the main character and she has a lot of strong feelings about herself and her displacement, and her disconnection with her culture. I think it’ll resonate with a lot of people who have felt displaced or like an outsider.
