Each week, Pacific Ties will be featuring a strip from “Two Item Combo,” a comic strip by Rickmond Wong, who is a Pacific Ties alumni from back in the day We dug this up from our archives and they’re too cool to hide away in a filing cabinent.  These comics ran in issues of Pacific Ties in 1998 and 1999.  Here’s what Wong had to say about “Two Item Combo”:

“‘Two Item Combo’ came about as a way to get Asian American faces into an artisitc medium where underrepresentaiton is the norm: the comic strip.  I made it a point to represent APIs in everyday (albeit humorous situations.  These characters DON’T have to deal with the often overplayed ‘themes’ of Aisan American literature, themes such as the generation gap, displacement, and the lack of an identity.

‘Two Item Combo,’ I believe, reflects the mentality of many young APIs, people who are comfortable with their sense of selves and therefore, aren’t always grappling with issues of ‘Asianness.’ The era of ‘Joy Luck’ literature is over; it’s time to move beyond the restrictions of ‘ethnic’ storytelling and just tell our stories the way they are, the way we live them.”

Wong’s statements still rings true today – this is what Pacific Ties is striving for, finding new ways to tell the stories of our communities without resorting to old themes and rehashing the same ideas.  Here is the 1st Grand Re-Debut of “Two Item Combo”. Click for a full view.