Larry Hama

Conversations

Christopher Irving, Christopher Irving

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496822758
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literaturkritik

Larry Hama (b. 1949) is the writer and cartoonist who helped develop the 1980s G.I. Joe toy line and created a new generation of fans from the tie-in comic book. Through many interviews, this volume reveals that G.I. Joe is far from his greatest feat as an artist. At different points in his life and career, Hama was mentored by comics legends Bernard Krigstein, Wallace Wood, and Neal Adams. Though their impact left an impression on his work, Hama has created a unique brand of storytelling that crosses various media. For example, he devised the character Bucky O'Hare, a green rabbit in outer space that was made into a comic book, toy line, video game, and television cartoon—with each medium in mind. Hama also discusses his varied career, from working at Neal Adams and Dick Giordano's legendary Continuity to editing a humor magazine at Marvel, developing G.I. Joe, and enjoying a long run as writer of Wolverine. This volume also explores Hama's life outside of comics. He is an activist in the Asian American community, a musician, and an actor in film and stage. He has also appeared in minor roles on the television shows M*A*S*H and Saturday Night Live and on Broadway. Editor and historian Christopher Irving compiles six of his own interviews with Hama, some of which are unpublished, and compiled others that range through Hama's illustrious career. The first academic volume on the artist, this collection gives a snapshot of Hama's unique character-driven and visual approach to comics' storytelling.

Larry Hama: Oral History Edition

JEFF YANG AND GABRIEL ROSENSTEIN / 2012

This unpublished interview was conducted for the Larry Hama documentary Making It up as I Go Along. The documentary can be found at https://vimeo.com/100823476, written, produced, and directed by Gabriel Rosenstein and Dave Abel. Reprinted by permission of Gabriel Rosenstein and David Abel of the Spitting Image.

Yang: Let’s get the administrative stuff out of the way first. Who are you?

Hama: I’m Larry Hama. I’m a writer, penciler, musician, sometime actor, whatever.

Yang: Man of all trades, master of none?

Hama: Yeah, I’ve been faking it all my life, pretty much.

Yang: Let’s begin at the beginning, page one, panel one. What do we open on? What’s the first thing you remember in your life, in your existence, very first image or memory?

Hama: The first memories I have are of 110th Street on the west side of Manhattan, where my family lived until I was, like, five, maybe. It was a neighborhood in transition, transitioning out of, like—from a Jewish area to Hispanic. It’s all gone now. There’s nothing there but, I guess, projects and new developments. They just tore that whole area down.

Yang: Being neither Jewish nor Hispanic, how did your family get there? How did your family arrive in the neighborhood?

Hama: Well, my uncle was the super in the building, and there was something, like, five other or six other Japanese American families in the building. So it was like this sort of mini ghetto in this one building. It’s the way it works. One person gets in someplace, and then, “Oh, I’ll call cousin so-and-so,” or whatever, and you pack the place.

Yang: Now, that was your uncle who was the super. What did your parents do at the time? Did they move from somewhere else to the United States?

Hama: My mom was born in Sacramento, California—grew up there. My dad was born in Japan, but he came to the States, worked as, like, a houseboy, actually, and saved his money and opened a restaurant or a club in Chicago in the thirties. They all ended up in New York after the war.

Yang: When you say he was a houseboy, where was he working as a houseboy?

Hama: Someplace on the West Coast. That’s what a lot of people did in those days. He was a jeweler, an optician, and a watchmaker. My mom had gone to FIT, actually. She was a model maker in the fashion business. She would take the drawing from the designer and actually make the garment that they would take apart to make the patterns out of.

Yang: How did the two of them meet?

Hama: I have no idea.

Yang: Really? You never asked them?

Hama: No. I mean, you know, nobody ever talks much about any of this stuff. I go to visit my aunt in Sacramento, who’s well into her nineties, and she starts talking about stuff. I try to draw her out because I want to find out about these things—and all my cousins are sitting there, and it’s their mom. They’re surprised at some of the stuff she says. “Wow, we never knew that.”

I think a lot of that generation were very tight-lipped about a lot of that stuff for a number of totally understandable, legitimate reasons. Lots of the guys in that generation jumped ship. They were here illegally, you know. There was this paranoia all the time, and the internment camps that have, like, cemented that paranoia. I grew up not really hearing a lot about these things because they weren’t things that people wanted to talk about.

Yang: There was a community, if even sort of like a one-building-sized community of Japanese Americans.

Hama: Well, yes. It wasn’t just these little buildings, but in New York City there was a very small Japanese American population compared to the Chinese community that had a brick-and-mortar community. Japanese American community was spread all over the place. I remember in the fifties there were a total of exactly three Japanese restaurants in the entire city of New York. It was Suehiro in Midtown and then the Aki Restaurant way up in Morningside Heights and another small, dinky place in Midtown on the West Side. That was it. There was one Japanese grocery store up on Broadway, up in the hundreds.

Yang: I imagine also at that time people going to Japanese restaurants were Japanese people predominantly, right? It wasn’t like today. People can eat sushi …

Hama: We hardly ever went to a Japanese restaurant because we couldn’t afford it. Japanese American people—well, in a lot of places if you went out to eat, you went to Chinese. It was just straight Cantonese food. You just, like, got the same stuff every time: lobster Cantonese, pork with tofu, sweet and sour whatever, wonton soup, and that terrible ice cream with the hard ice crystals. [laughs]

There were two Japanese American churches. There was a Buddhist church and a Christian church. I think it was Methodist or something.

Yang: Was your family religious at all?

Hama: Not particularly, but we belonged to the Buddhist church. I went to Buddhist Sunday School, which was kind of odd because Buddhist Sunday School beyond the level of, like, pasting pictures of Siddhartha into, like, little books was more about—it was sort of like comparative religion. We studied what other people believed. Our Sunday school teacher had a law degree from Harvard, and he was the son of the minister. We read Paul Tillich. We read all this theology. We went on little field trips to visit, like, Quakers or whatever else because it was all about less doctrinal than finding your own way.

Yang: I suppose that must have been—even if it wasn’t a central aspect of your life, I mean, the very fact that you were in a situation where the place that was teaching you how to live or to find a path to personal nirvana or salvation was also saying it’s your way that’s important, not the way we’re teaching it. That must have had a pretty big impact on some level.

Hama: Also, the Japanese Buddhist church on Riverside Drive had all these other cultural programs going. They had a martial arts dojo in the basement. They had a really successful judo club and karate, kyudo, which is Zen archery, kendo. They also had Japanese dance, calligraphy, flower arrangement, and Japanese School. I went to Japanese School there for, I think, six years or something, and I got the equivalent of like a Japanese first-grade education.

Yang: I know that very well, from a Chinese perspective.

Hama: Right.

Yang: I’m still a first-grader. So it really was a cultural center, and it was across different generations, obviously.

Hama: Yeah. I learned enough that I could read, like, kiddie manga. I could read the phonetic alphabets and maybe 150 to 200 ideograms.

Yang: Could you speak Japanese?

Hama: The simple ideograms. Well, the problem is that the Japanese that I speak is what my grandparents spoke, which hasn’t been a living language in Japan for, like, over a hundred years, and it’s a sort of a bumpkin dialect, the farm dialect.

When I went to Tokyo and spoke what I considered Japanese, people were just like, “Wow, you talk like you’re in a samurai movie or something.” It’s sort of like talking like an 1820s Quaker or something. [laughs]

Yang: Like “thous.”

Hama: Yes. All the words I know for everything have been obsolete for a century.

Yang: So instead of car, you’d say giant wheeled dragon powered by steam or something.

Hama: Yes. The modern word for “movie” is eiga, and I grew up calling it a katsudo shashin, which goes back to, like, the silent era. There were words that I just thought were totally universally Japanese somehow. I call a train a kisha, but that literally means something that moves by burning wood. [laughs] They haven’t called it that in quite a bit. They’re called electric trains now.

Yang: Well when they stopped burning wood to make them move—I suppose that’s when they stopped calling them that.

Hama: Densha.

Yang: Densha, right. Densha Otoko. So this was your experience of the Japanese community. Presumably we’re talking about hundreds of people or thousands, at most?

Hama: We’re talking hundreds, not thousands, because there’s specifically a Japanese American community. There were Japanese people here, but they were, like, Kaisha, people who worked for the corporations. They would be here for a number of years, and they would go back.

Yang: So there was no interaction between—

Hama: Very little, very little interaction, and culturally there was very little interaction with other Asians.

Yang: Other than eating at Chinese restaurants.

Hama: Yeah.

Yang: So this is growing up. At the time, we’re talking here—this is the fifties?

Hama: Mm-hmm.

Yang: So we’re still talking about well before there was even significant immigration of other than Chinese, right?

Hama: Right.

Yang: Even then, it was formally illegal still for Chinese to come. I mean, the Exclusion Act still applied. You were one of the handful of Japanese who had kind of gotten in under the wire. How did that make you look at other people and vice versa? Was there a real sense of people looking at you strangely, especially after the war, I suppose?

Hama: Yeah. When I think back about how I related as an Asian person to people in the neighborhood I grew up in, I grew up in a neighborhood in eastern Queens called Floral Park, and I went to an elementary school in which I was pretty much the only person in the school who wasn’t white, period. And there were no Protestants in the neighborhood. It was Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish. Anybody who wasn’t Jewish was Catholic … [laughs]

I don’t think I met a Protestant until I got to high school. On days when a Catholic holiday would overlap with a Jewish holiday, I’d be the only person in the class. It was pretty bizarre. But at the same time, I experienced very little of that feeling of otherness something. I don’t know if it was the type of neighborhood or not, but I don’t remember feeling ostracized in any way. It was like a lower-middle-class, working-class neighborhood, and I felt very accepted and comfortable in that neighborhood.

Yang: How did your family move from the—was it Upper West Side or Upper East Side?

Hama: Upper West Side.

Yang: From the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Floral Park.

Hama: My family moved to Floral Park, I think, basically so that I could go to a good school. The reason we moved to this neighborhood is so that our daughter could go to a good school on the next block. It’s all about educating the kids, and it’s all about transitioning your priorities to the next generation. That’s a very sort of Asian thought process.

Yang: Did you have a very close relationship with your parents? They clearly were thinking of you in deciding to move to Floral Park when you were, what, five, six years old, I suppose.

Hama: Well, yeah. I mean, your closeness with your parents within an Asian context is a lot different. Your closeness is about other factors. It’s about what you owe them and what they owe you. The structure of obligation is very strong.

The thing that motivates you, that’s pounded into you, is, like, not to embarrass your family, not to cause them any shame. It’s not like people propound this stuff and set it down verbally. It’s this weird form of osmosis that you know, “Oh, I shouldn’t ever say that or bring that up.” I remember in the second or third grade just, like, staying awake at night worrying about my grades. [laughs] Of course, I got over that by the time I got to high school, when I realized that I could capitalize on my otherness to a degree rather than surrender to it. “Okay, let’s go all the way, be as freaky as—if people are going to do this anyway, might as well grab the whole hog.”

Yang: That’s really interesting, and I want to come back to that, because it’s sort of your awareness of the ability to turn difference into a counterculture. Your relationship with your parents wasn’t about—I’m projecting here, but it wasn’t about hugging, it wasn’t about kind of demonstrating affection. They certainly didn’t talk a lot about their own personal stories. What was it like? What was your typical interaction with your mother and father, and was it different between your mother and your father?

Hama: Well, my dad died when I was in second grade, so I barely knew him. And then my mother had to go back to work. She didn’t go back into the fashion industry. She got a job as a bilingual secretary for a Japanese export/import firm. When she graduated high school in Sacramento, my grandparents sent her to Japan to live for a year with a cousin and get finished. She had gone to Japanese School every day after school for her entire life, so she could read and write. She was totally bilingual, which was a really marketable skill at that time when Japanese companies were trying to get established here. I was basically raised by my grandparents.

Yang: Did your mom or your mom’s family get interned?

Hama: Yes. My mom’s family and my mom and her sisters were all in an internment camp until the end of the war, and then they somehow ended up in Cleveland first and then came to New York.

Yang: Which camp were they in?

Hama: Tule Lake. Tule Lake was a camp for people that were considered troublemakers, because my grandfather belonged to what they called a kenjin kai, which is like a Chinese family association, but it’s an association based on what prefecture you’re from. Most of the Japanese Americans on the West Coast were only from three prefectures in Japan. My grandfather belonged to the prefecture organization from where he came from, and if you belonged to these organizations, they put you on the list.

Yang: Like the equivalent of a terrorist watch list or something.

Hama: Yes, which makes you realize how specious some of this categorization is, because basically these organizations were about social stuff and about money. It’s the same thing as the Chinese fa...