Secret Identities: Parry Shen Unmasked
Like many fanboys and fangirls, Shen’s interest in comic books started in his youth, which of course begs the question: DC or Mavel? “I’m a Marvel guy,” states Shen without hesitation. “When I was a kid, I was attracted to Marvel because of how they humanized their characters, whether I knew it or not. DC’s characters were stuck in a rut where they had the villain of the day and [the heroes] had to foil their plans for world domination. Spiderman and the X-men were the first to delve into stories that featured real people with powers. The X-men were trying to help society, but society hated them and were scared of them. But, I have to say, my first comic book was The Picture Bible, which my mom gave me. It told Bible stories in comic format, complete with superheroic feats like the parting of the Red Sea. I’m not Catholic, but when I went to Catholic school, thanks to that book, I knew all of the Bible stories. It was really cool how this comic presented the Bible in such a digestible format, and that it tricked me into learning. The last page of Secret Identities follows along that theme — it shows a timeline that maps the stories against Asian American history. Hopefully, readers will get to the end and say, ‘holy cow, this was based on something real?’”
During college, Shen became an officer in his on-campus Asian American organization when he decided to enter the entertainment industry. He interned at Marvel Comics, working in the licensing department, but ultimately chose the route of an actor. When I ask whether Shen ever considered becoming involved in the comic book industry full-time, he laughs, saying: “I didn’t see where I could fit into it, except as an editor or a writer. I couldn’t draw!” Ironically, had Shen stuck with Marvel Comics’ licensing department, he might have become a full-fledged comics insider: several years after Shen’s internship, Avi Arad rejuvenated the Marvel Comics franchise via expansion of that same licensing department to oversee film adaptations of Spiderman, X-men and the Fantastic Four.
Perhaps fulfilling his earliest suspicions of where he might fit into the comic book industry, Shen has surpassed all expectations in his role as Managing Editor for Secret Identities. Speaking about the editorial process, Shen expounds on the difficulties the board faced trying to build a cohesive anthology from a wide array of talented writers and artists with varying styles and experience in the comic medium. “Secret Identities had a lot of contributors, because we had somebody write a story and another person draw it. We had to coordinate the schedules for over 60 creators.”
The risk of anthologies is that they can come off as disjointed — certainly, Secret Identities occasionally suffers from that problem. However, Shen points out that a great deal of effort and attention was put towards ensuring that the whole book “gelled together”. “The essence of an anthology is that different styles and different writers come together to produce a beautiful work. We focused on pairing people according to their strengths and their styles of writing and their styles of artwork.”
The editors, too, seemed to play to one anothers’ strengths. Keith Chow, a freelance writer coached contributors in script-writing, while Shen notes that both he and Jeff Yang (columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle) offered different perspectives originating from their experiences in the mainstream entertainment industry. And it was Jerry Ma, founder of freelance graphic design studio Epic Proportions, who literally saved the look of the book. Initially, the editors struggled with the 4-6 page limit placed on each submission. “We fudged [those limits] a little,” says Shen, “but it shows why everyone’s favourite story is Blue Scorpion & Chung. It needs that length.” The problem was that with each story trying to make the most of 4 pages, all the artwork became little boxes. “Midway through, Jerry realized that the book was beginning to look like a street map! He was the one who said, ‘visually, this book isn’t looking very good’, so [based on his comments] we re-wrote some stuff and gave the artists room to breathe.”
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