Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture

by Eric Nakamura (editor)

A deluxe hardcover that celebrates the pop culture phenomenon, Giant Robot, who redefined what it meant to be Asian-American for the late 20th Century

Los Angeles, 1994. Two Asian-American punk rockers staple together the zine of their dreams featuring Sumo, Hong Kong Cinema and Osamu Tezuka. From the very margins of the DIY press and alternative culture, Giant Robot burst into the mainstream with over 60,000 copies in circulation annually at its peak. Giant Robot even popped right off the page, setting up a restaurant, gallery, and storefronts in LA, as well as galleries and stores in New York and San Francisco. As their influence grew in the 90s and 00s, Giant Robot was eventually invited to the White House by Barack Obama, to speak at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and to curate the GR Biennale 3 at the Japanese American National Museum.

Home to a host of unapologetically authentic perspectives bridging the bicultural gap between Asian and Asian-American pop culture, GR had the audacity to print such topics side-by-side, and become a touchstone for generations of artists, musicians, creators, and collectors of all kinds in a pre-social media era. Nowhere else were pieces on civil rights activists running next to articles on skateboarding and Sriracha. Toy collectors, cartoonists, and street style pioneers got as many column inches as Michelle Yeoh, Karen O, James Jean, and Haruki Murakami.

Giant Thirty Years of Defining Asian-American Pop Culture features the best of the magazine’s sixty-eight issue run alongside never-before-seen photographs, supplementary writing by Giant Robot contributor and journalist Claudine Ko, and tributes from everyone who had a hand in making the magazine and storefronts into a cultural touchstone for so many. Now a contemporary art gallery GR2 and specialty retailer at its home on Sawtelle in LA, Giant Robot continues to carve out space for friends and fans alike to keep coming together.

Genres: Nonfiction

464 pages, Hardcover

Published October 22, 2024

Reviews

[Drew Canole · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really well done collection of magazine articles from Giant Robot, 90s and early 00s. Captures the zeitgeist of Asian Americans during that period, with a focus on creative people.

I really liked the interview with comics legend Alfredo Alcala where he is shitting on the 90s comics anatomy.

I'm probably not the target audience for this but I can appreciate the effort the editors put in here. I think more magazines should be archived in this way. My only criticism is they should have shown the covers in full pages or atleast quarter size! Some of them looked really cool, but I only got a small image for each.

[Dorothy Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just received this in the mail and although I haven’t read it cover to cover, simply flipping through it brought me back to reading many of these stories in the magazine in high school. As an Asian American teen who never felt quite alt enough in the punk spaces, visiting the store on Sawtelle and picking up the magazine at the local comic store always made me feel less alone and also less like a weird loser. The artists I learned about and the movies I watched after reading the magazine made me feel like I could make art and write too. I remember even driving up from San Diego in college to see my favorite Japanese band, Love Psychedelico, perform at the gallery. This book is gorgeous, the printing is spectacular and the design is beautiful as the magazine always was. But when I hold this I see me from 20-25 years ago and Im grateful now as I was grateful then. I’m indebted.