Coming up in August, Amadeus Cho creators Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa will take on a coming-of-age stories that pits giant mechs against enormous alien monsters.
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That’s a tried-and-true genre, baked into a tried-and-true genre, that churns out something pretty new and fresh.
ComicBook.com had a chance to read over the first issue, and spoke briefly with Pak about the series.
Final order cutoff for the first issue is July 10, and the issue goes on sale August 2. Contact your retailer to pre-order a copy.
So, what came first, coming up with a project to work with Tak on again, or developing Mech Cadet Yu?
I’d had the initial idea for Mech Cadet Yu about 15 years ago as I was finishing up my feature film Robot Stories — several years before I ever worked with Tak. But when I started seriously thinking of the story as a comic book project, Tak was always my dream artist.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with Tak on a bunch of projects — from co-creating Amadeus Cho back in the day to a run on Turok to collaborating on three big Kickstarter books, and I just love everything he does. He’s kind of in my head — he just gets all the nuance and humor and emotion I’m going for in every scene, and he nails it every time.
Tak’s particularly good with young characters and he loves giant robots, so Mech Cadet Yu really feels like a perfect match. I’m soooo grateful and happy to be working with him on this! This is also a good time to plug colorist Triona Farrell and letterer Simon Bowland, who are both doing tremendous work on the book.
What can you tease about this story that makes it different from other mech adventure stories?
We’ve seen stories of individual kids and their giant robots. And we’ve seen stories with armies of giant robots heading into battle. But in Mech Cadet Yu, we’re following a group of young kids at a military academy training with their giant robots. So that’s fun and hopefully fresh.
I just love the interactions of these kids and the dynamic of a janitor’s boy getting his shot at glory in this elite military academy. It’s a classic underdog story with tons of heart and huge stakes, and I’m loving every minute of working on it.
I also think there’s something fun to the fact that we’ve got a bunch of Asian-American leads in the story. Giant robot stories are beloved in both Asia and America, but I’m hard pressed to think of any giant robot stories like this that have specifically featured Asian-American heroes. So that brings out subtle nuances that feel fresh and compelling to me.
In the first issue, we meet a handful of people but really, it’s more about world-building and for the most part you only get a really good sense for a couple of characters. Who are the main players in the book?
Our hero is Stanford Yu, a janitor’s kid who works at the Sky Corps Academy in Los Robos, Arizona. Every four years, a group of mysterious giant robots arrives from outer space to bond with cadets from the Academy. As a janitor’s kid, Stanford should never even dream of bonding with one of those robots. But this year, something goes very wrong… or maybe very right.
Other principal characters include Stanford’s protective mom Dolly; Captain Skip Tanaka, the legendary hero who years ago was the very first kid to bond with a giant robot; General Park, the tough, devious head of the school; and cadets Sanchez, Olivetti, and Park. Park is the daughter of General Park, and she’s Stanford’s chief antagonist and kind of steals every scene she’s in.
There IS a lot of world-building, and we have a character in Skip who, even in-story, is larger than life. Is part of the fun of a book like this almost dabbling in myth and legend, telling a story that’s bigger than the people who inhabit it?
Oh, you bet. This is a story about a kid who aches to fly a giant robot, a kid who dreams of something bigger and better, an underdog with the heart of a hero. So, the story’s grappling with big themes about what it means to grow up and what it means to be a hero, and having some larger-than-life aspirational figures and robots in the book feels just right.
But there’s a looming sense, of course, that there’s a more nuanced and complicated side to all those dreams…
I think there’s also something fun to the world-building in that we’ve got a science-fiction world with robots and alien monsters and whatnot, but there’s an almost mythic or fable-like set up to the whole thing, with these mysterious robots descending to Earth every four years to bond specifically with kids. That all feels just right to me and sets up a great emotional dynamic for this coming-of-age story for all these kid heroes.
That said, it definitely is character-based. Park is actually more of an antagonist in the first issue than the Sharg threat. What motivated that?
You can have all the crazy action and pyrotechnics in the world and no one will give a damn if they don’t care about the characters. Compelling characters are everything in genre fiction, and we’re doing our best to make both our heroes and antagonists as fun and real as we can.
I freaking love Park. She’s so petty and snide and at the same time so proud and smart. I love the emotional conflicts she’s struggling with in her own heart; I love the way she’s the hero of her own story; and I love how gloriously nasty she can be. She’s a total blast to write and it’s gonna be a huge amount of fun to see her cut loose with Stanford when the time comes.
There are some pretty obvious influences here, but you succeed in avoiding that thing of feeling like you’re doing “your take on Robotech” or something like that where it’s just a veneer of change. As you’re writing, do you look to actively subvert tropes of the material that inspired you?
I’ve loved all kinds of robot stories over the years—heck, I made a feature film back in 2002 called Robot Stories ’cause I love robot stories so much. But when I started working on the story that eventually became Mech Cadet Yu, I only remember thinking about other beloved giant robot stories in the sense that I was planning to do something distinct from them. Not that I was necessarily trying to subvert tropes—it was just that I had a different situation and world and characters in mind from the great stories I’d seen before.
So yes, we’ve all seen awesome stories about kids with giant robots, from Johnny Sokko on. But I started with this almost fable or myth-like angle on the idea, which felt distinct to me… this notion of giant robots mysteriously arriving in the desert every four years to bond with kids. And that led to the idea of the military forming this academy to train kids to go meet these robots, and the idea of an ongoing war against giant monsters that these kids would train for.
And then this underdog janitor’s kid came into my head, with his specific experience as an Asian-American, working-class immigrant’s kid, and I started thinking about what would happen if he ended up in the academy with these privileged children of the elite, and the story really started coming together.
