Character sketch of Koji and his mom Adeline created to sell the graphic novel manuscript "Gaijin-American Prisoner of War", written and illus.d by me and publ.d by Disney/Hyperion.
This is the first sketch I did for the book of its two main characters together. Its funny for me to see this now after all the work done in developing both of them. There's a lot about them that has remained and that's interesting to me too. The main purpose of presenting this sketch with the package to the publisher was that I'd just started to do research on the way the internees/prisoners were treated by the government and I just couldn't believe what we did to our neighbors. Whole families were housed in horse stalls by our government for several months prior to being moved to prison camps further out in the mountains and desert- all because of their Japanese heritage. Interesting, too, to hear some adults response when I make presentations on this material. Some have been perfectly happy with the Japanese American Internment during WWII. After all, we were under attack- what'd you expect us to do. My response- "So I guess we're the land of the free and home of the brave unless we're scared. So much for the Bill of Rights" By the way, of the 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned during WWII, 2/3s were American citizens and over half were children. Pen&Ink, 2007.
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