Actor, author and activist George Takei, best known for playing Sulu in Star Trek, is teaming with IDW Publishing for a new graphic memoir about his childhood in American internment camps during World War II.
They Called Us Enemy revisits Takei's haunting childhood in American concentration camps, as one of 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. To be released in summer 2019, the memoir will be co-written by Takei, Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, with art from Harmony Becker.
Here's the first look at the cover art:
George Takei has captured hearts and minds worldwide with his magnetic performances, sharp wit, and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s — and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future.
In 1942, at the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, every person of Japanese descent on the west coast was rounded up and shipped to one of ten “relocation centers,” hundreds or thousands of miles from home, where they would be held for years under armed guard.
They Called Us Enemy is Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s tested faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future.
What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.
Takei's story previously inspired the musical Allegiance, which premiered on Broadway in 2015.
More here: George Takei's THEY CALLED US ENEMY Coming in 2019
