Ignatz Award-winning comic book creator Shing Yin Kohr, who previously explored the mythic and cultural impact of Route 66 in 2016's The American Dream?, is back with a new graphic novel delving into the legends of Paul Bunyan. Written as part historical fiction and part magical realism, The Legend of Auntie Po centers on a girl named Mei in an 1885 American logging camp, reimagining Bunyan's tales as adventures led by Chinese heroine Auntie Po. As Mei and her father work at the camp, Auntie Po surfaces, a matriarch that echoes well-known American tall tales while standing proudly as her own character.

In an exclusive interview with CBR, Kohr details the extensive research they did about the legend of Paul Bunyan and 19th-century logging camps in America, their art style and coloring choices for the book and the story's commentary on the nature of storytelling.

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Shing, what is your own connection with American tall tales and the legend of Paul Bunyan in particular?

Shing Yin Khor: I got really into the Paul Bunyan mythos when a friend and I started a silly competition to visit as many Paul Bunyan statues as we could in two years. I genuinely do not remember why now. I have a custom Google Map that logs the location of Paul Bunyan statues in the continental United States (defined as an oversized lumberjack statue), and I've visited over twenty of them, but I did not win the competition. In the process of doing this, I got really engrossed in the evolution of the Paul Bunyan myths. I've always been interested in Americana, or the nostalgic fiction of America (my first book is on driving Route 66) and especially the process of making these myths. Specifically, I'm interested in how myths evolve away from oral traditions and become more reflective of dominant narratives because of the people who document them.

The myth of Paul Bunyan gets progressively more sanitized as he becomes a patriotic character during the World Wars, and then becomes a story for children about a quaint big lumberjack in the woods. But the stories closest to the oral tradition are very deeply about the working class, even if Bunyan himself is not necessary the hero of all these stories (there is a story where he cheats his workers out of their pay, for instance).

The other thing I realized when going back to these early stories and early logging history, especially on the West Coast, is how they actually reflected the diversity of logging camps at the time. These descriptions and drawings of Black loggers or Japanese cooks are racist (at absolute best, old-fashioned and a reflection of their era), but even they have generally been erased by the modern conception of Paul Bunyan and his crew as a mythological white American story. Indigenous loggers worked in camps, including in Indigenous-run logging concerns, as did Black workers, Chinese and Japanese workers, and other immigrants. Yet, modern mythology makes more room for the Swedish and German immigrants more than it does for the Chinese and Japanese.

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How was it researching logging camps for this book, especially the importance of Chinese workers and their families at these remote locations? Was there anything in particular that surprised you in that research?

Khor: I relied on two books a lot -- Sue Fawn Chung's Chinese in the Woods as the only academic book on the Chinese working class in a logging camp and the late Iris Chang's The Chinese in America added a lot of additional context for Chinese life in this era. My biggest surprise was finding out that some Chinese cooks were paid more than white cooks, which was a fact that I shaped a lot of the book around. Ah Hao is surprised by that fact too when he realizes that he was paid better than the white cook.

I definitely had to adapt history a bit here. We know that logging camps with families generally had cabins for families, who lived away from the other workers, who lived in bunkhouses. We know that Chinese workers had separate bunkhouses from white workers. We know that some Chinese workers were employed with their white bosses for a very long time, often following them to different cities, and some were paid quite well. There is no specific record of a Chinese family working as camp cooks in a logging camp, but we have a fair amount of records of Chinese cooks in logging camps. When we consider the scant scraps of material we have in the historical record about working Chinese in this era, we do have to make some assumptions that things might have happened, simply based on all the other centuries of human history and observed behavior we have for reference. I intentionally wrote Hels as a character that is truly on the more progressive side, all things considered. He does consider Ah Hao and Mei as family because they’ve been together for so long. He is kind to his Black and Chinese workers, but he is also naive about the racism they actually face. He thinks he can fix it through friendship and his good intentions. He can’t.

With so much of this story being about the nature and importance of storytelling as a whole, what was something you wanted to highlight in this intersection of cultures viewing similar mythologies through their own cultural prisms?

Khor: I intentionally wrote Auntie Po as not actually being all that culturally Chinese. She really is just Paul Bunyan as an elderly Chinese matriarch, because the culture that Mei is most attuned to is actually logging camp culture. So much of what existing in the diaspora is is having to build your own cultures from the scraps of what you were told, and sometimes it becomes a desperate need for authenticity and sometimes it becomes something altogether new and incredible and personal.

But I think that all humans have a tendency to self-cast themselves into stories and into mythology. And those of us who are from marginalized communities have generally had to do it more than most because the dominant cultures we exist in were not interested in writing stories about us, or our stories were blocked from having dominant platforms.

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In addition to being a meditation on myth, this story really is about the sacrifices parents make for their children. How vital was it juxtaposing Mei's perspective with her father's?

Khor: I wrote the entire book from Mei's perspective at first, but the book did not feel like it clicked until I added the scenes with Ah Hao (that did not have Mei in them). This is a book about how Mei needs to grow out of her comfort zone and find her own story, so it was important to also have Ah Hao's perspective -- he wants to protect her, he has been leveraging his proximity to whiteness to give her as comfortable a life he can, but this is not sustainable. The book didn’t really come together until I gave Ah Hao a voice too.

I also really wanted to portray a loving and supportive Chinese parent. I feel like I grew up reading a lot of portrayals of Asian parents that were really contentious relationships, but I have a nice relationship with my parents, who are loving and supportive, even if they are not entirely sure what my job is all the time.

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This book's artwork has a vibrant, watercolor palette and spacious paneling. What was it that you wanted to accomplish visually with this story?

Khor: Honestly, I just don't have that much range. This is how I draw and paint. I am most drawn to sweet and intimate conversational moments but also establishing shots that allow me to draw details like Old West towns and log cabins. My favorite parts to draw were probably the maps and diagrams, even if there are only a few.

Mostly, I feel like my art is extremely functional. I'm drawing to communicate the story. There were some scenes that I was a bit indulgent about, mostly all the double-page spreads, but I'm mostly just trying to tell the story with as much clarity as my drawing skills will allow.

I really enjoyed being able to hand-paint an entire book traditionally with watercolors. The first thing I do when beginning to color a long project is establish my color scheme. It's easy to get lost in the wide range of options a fully stocked watercolor set has to offer, especially if you're a little raccoon paint hoarder, so I know that immediately limiting my choices will make the book more cohesive in the end. I'll put my paint options in an entirely new palette and set aside all my other colors.

I did really enjoy the parts where I got indulgent. If you lay the cover flat, the background image forms a pyramid, a reference to the "Pyramid 40" (also briefly referenced on page 166 of the book), a 40-acre plot of land shaped like a pyramid which Paul Bunyan worked. The shape of the land meant that it could have a significantly larger amount of trees than a flat piece of land. One of the things I loved most about working with Jasmin Rubero to design the book was getting to build on each others' ideas. One of the early text treatments she chose for the book's title was styled like a woodblock print. I loved it, but if we were going in that direction, I wanted a chance to make a truly unique title block. So, I carved it. The title for Auntie Po is made from hand-carved lino block stamps. I accidentally carved them in reverse and had to flip them in Photoshop, and we ended up fixing a lot of the stamping artifacts digitally, but I am delighted that you can still see the stamp texture on the "THE" and "OF" on the cover.

What's a big thing you hope connects with readers as they read The Legend of Auntie Po?

Khor: I hope that they know that they have the agency to have and tell their own stories.

Written and illustrated Shing Yin Khor, The Legend of Auntie Po is on sale June 15 from Kokila.

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