IDW Publishing imprint Top Shelf Productions have announced “They Called Us Enemy,” a graphic novel about Star Trek star George Takei’s childhood, which will be published next summer. The memoir, which is scripted by Justin Eisinger and Steve Scott, and illustrated by Harmony Becker (“Himawari Share”), will explore when Takei, aged just four, became one of 120,000 Japanese Americans interned by the federal government in concentration camps during World War II. Here’s the cover and synopsis:
George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his magnetic performances, sharp wit, and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s — and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten “relocation centers,” hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.
They Called Us Enemy is Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.
What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.
Takei’s childhood experience has previously formed the experience of the musical Allegiance, which he performed in in San Diego in 2012, and on Broadway in 2015. “It has always been my mission in life to raise the awareness of the unjust imprisonment of Japanese Americans in barbed-wire prison camps during World War II,” Takei told The Hollywood Reporter. “But I had no idea how chillingly relevant that dark chapter of American history would be to our times today.”
Eisinger and Scott will share a first look at Becker’s interior artwork tomorrow at the San Diego Comic Con, during the 1pm PST panel “The Human Condition: Connecting Humanity with Graphic Novels.”
