For comics writer Greg Pak, reimagining an old Marvel Universe superhero from the 1940s as a Korean American teenage brainiac was also a chance to turn a decades-old stereotype on its head.
by Jimmy Lee
Photos courtesy of Greg Pak and Marvel Comics
Amadeus Cho holds his own fighting a god.
Even the Mighty Thor can’t fend off Amadeus’ headache-inducing mace blows, not to mention his sarcastic verbal assaults. And using his lightning-quick brain to calculate velocity vectors, Amadeus can turn Mjolnir, Thor’s magical hammer, against the Norse god of thunder. “There is nothing about you that does not annoy me,” the frustrated Thor tells the precocious teen. Despite getting under this deity’s skin, Amadeus is soon teaming up with Thor to thwart the bad guy and restore some order to the Marvel Universe.
Amadeus Cho’s rise to prominence in the comics world is a triumph of the geek. Here’s a guy who can’t fly, lacks anything close to the power of a locomotive and is far slower than a speeding bullet. Rather, what gets him through sticky situations is his incredible smarts, with a snarky, biting comment often thrown in for good measure.
For people of Korean descent, the advent of Amadeus represents a milestone of another sort. Now there’s a full-fledged Korean American superhero engaged in action-packed derringdo, alongside other Marvel superstars such as Spider-Man and Wolverine. The guy’s even got his own comic book, with a miniseries, “The Heroic Age: Prince of Power,” just ending its four-issue run a few months ago.
The person responsible for this Atlas-like feat is Greg Pak. While Amadeus can perform complex calculations that turn a situation’s physics to his advantage (redirecting a laser-guided missile with a wing mirror, for example), the ability to transform words on a page into compelling cliffhangers is Pak’s out-of-the-ordinary skill. And that he subverts Asian American stereotypes through that process, some would say that’s pretty heroic, too.
A graduate of New York University’s film school, Pak was writing and directing movies when his agent arranged a meeting with Marvel. The legendary comic book publisher was seeking new scribes, and Pak’s 2003 feature-length anthology film Robot Stories, which was winning dozens of awards at multiple festivals around that time, proved to be perfect portfolio padding.
“[Robot Stories is] not a good writing sample for a traditional, single-story movie, but it turned out to be a great writing sample for comics because it’s four stories that are on screen, [each] 20 minutes long, which is roughly the [time spent reading] a comic book,” said Pak. “And each story dealt with a real emotional conflict and issues between people, but also had a sci-fi twist. And in a lot of ways that’s what Marvel comics are all about. It’s about taking a crazy superhero-slash-sci-fi situation, but telling a real human story at the core.”
In 2005, shortly after joining the company, Pak and other new writers were asked to re-imagine Marvel-owned characters from the World War II-era Golden Age of Comic Books. From the list presented to him, Pak picked Master Mind Excello “because it was so big and crazy-sounding.”
The original Excello, whose true identity was Earl Everett and who possessed mental wizardry skills, appeared in a comic book only twice during the 1940s. “At the time, I had a hankering to write a young character who talked too much,” said Pak. “I just wanted to have some fun with fast, glib dialogue. Master Mind Excello seemed likely to provide that opportunity.”
Pak’s plan for anointing a new mastermind was to have Amadeus win an Internet quiz competition sponsored by the Excello Soap Company. This being the Marvel Universe, the contest would actually be a recruiting tool for a secret agency. And the victorious Korean American with the uncommon moniker (“‘Amadeus’ is a riff on the way Asian American parents will sometimes give their kids crazy aspirational names like ‘Stanford’ or ‘Harvard’,” said Pak) would be revealed to be the seventh smartest person in the world.
“With a name like Master Mind Excello, it’s pretty clear your brain’s going to be your big power,” said Pak.
Now, there’s no need to start bemoaning yet another Asian male character who is just bookish and socially inept. For Pak, Amadeus was a means to mess with the model minority myth.
“I realized there was an opportunity here to take the myth on directly by making Amadeus insanely smart while giving him other attributes that go directly against the myth,” said Pak. “Let him be a supergenius, but then dismantle the aspects of the stereotype that deal with inscrutability, and the emotionless, un-American, robotic and hyper-efficiently obedient stereotypes.”
So what you get with Amadeus is also a smart ass, constantly armed with a wisecracking retort, and someone with a “lack of impulse control who wears all his emotions and biases on his sleeve,” Pak described. Plus, Amadeus gets some romantic action—albeit, his girlfriend is a green Gorgon, the female creatures from Greek mythology with venomous snakes for hair. But she’s no ordinary Gorgon: Amadeus is getting it on with the queen.
Of course, there’s more than one way to negate a stereotype. Pak has also devised characters who are the complete opposite of the tired Asian male representations of sexless and powerless men that are so often being railed against in magazines like this. One such example is Jake Oh, a Korean American agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., the elite law enforcement agency of the Marvel Universe, who first appeared in the “X-Men: Phoenix – Warsong” miniseries. “He’s a big American lughead, a military guy as far from the egghead stereotype as you can get,” Pak said. And for Secret Identities, an Asian American superhero anthology, he created a Japanese American soldier named Sergeant Franklin Murakawa who becomes the Citizen, a superhero that uses his enhanced combat skills to serve the red, white and blue.
But creating characters just to contradict decades-old stereotypes has its own pitfalls. “It’s very limiting that because Asians are stereotyped as being smart, I should write a bunch of dumb characters, you know what I’m saying. That doesn’t make sense,” said Pak.
Yet, invoking model minority tropes while simultaneously tearing them down—that is what gives this comic book writer so much enjoyment. “It’s just a fun way to provoke a little thought and to do something interesting at the same time,” said Pak.
Well before penning all these Asian American characters’ origin stories in the hallowed pages of Marvel, Pak, as early as age 5, was tracing and drawing Superman comics, with his mom filling in the speech balloons. “I had dictated those to her,” Pak recalled.
In high school and as a Yale undergraduate, he cartooned for his school papers, and later produced a comic strip titled “American Seoul” for the Korea Times’ New York edition. Eventually, however, it would be filmmaking that would dominate his creative energies, and Pak still finds time to make movies even now.
But he couldn’t pass up the opportunity with Marvel. And as a creative person with an intense desire to grow artistically, there’s one notable benefit with comic books: “The turnaround time is insane,” said Pak. “I can write something today that goes to the artist tomorrow, and I can start to see [illustrated] pages a couple days after that. You see projects through completion very quickly, and it just gives you constant ongoing opportunities to see how things are working, and to take that [feedback] and try to get better.”
Some of the characters Pak has scripted for Marvel include Iron Man and the X-Men. And his stories for the iconic Incredible Hulk, like the “World War Hulk” series, have been a hit with readers and critics. It was while writing for the angry green one that Pak got to enmesh Amadeus (who made his first appearance in the 2006 anthology “Amazing Fantasy,” volume 2, no. 16, illustrated by Takeshi Miyazawa) deeper into the Marvel world, as a sidekick of Hercules, the Greek half-god.
“It was decided that Amadeus and Hercules would sort of be the Marvel Universe’s premier brains and brawns duo,” said Fred Van Lente, who became Pak’s co-author as the latter was getting overloaded working on other titles. The eight story arcs that the writing partners conceived for Amadeus and Hercules a few years ago are now coming to a conclusion, with the fictitious pair at the center of “Chaos War,” whose first issue was released in October. “[This crossover series is] the big, climactic, universe-exploding storyline involving every major hero in the Marvel Universe,” said Van Lente, who’s gone on to write for the likes of Spider- Man.
“It’s just been a huge pleasure working with Greg and writing for Amadeus,” said Van Lente, who over the course of a phone conversation will accidentally refer to Pak as Amadeus.
Creator and creation do have some commonalities, like a well-worn green army jacket. “But unlike Amadeus, Greg still wears that thing,” joked Van Lente. And Pak and Amadeus share the same favorite dish: miyeokguk, Korean seaweed soup.
“It was just one of those why-not moments,” said Pak, when asked why he decided to make Amadeus Korean American. And no one at Marvel opposed the idea or suggested otherwise, which would not likely be the case if Pak proposed such a concept for a major American movie production.
“I’ve spent years moaning about the lack of multidimensional Asian American characters in American media,” said Pak. “And here I had this incredible opportunity to create a new character with no restrictions. So I put my money where my mouth was.”
