Interview with Diana Huh

On a sunny Saturday morning in Los Angeles Little Tokyo, I met up with local webcomic artist Diana Huh for the first in-person interview for this blog. With food and snacks from my favorite coffee shop, Cafe Dulce, and the musical talent of the legendary one-man band Arthur Nakane playing in the background, we had the opportunity to chat about life, comics, and Asian American identity.

Diana is a young, hip, Korean American, comic nerd and history junkie. When she’s not singing songs from the Hamilton musical (which she loves), she’s the daughter who diligently calls home to check on her parents and the motel they run in Oregon. Currently Diana works for Disney as a storyboard artist for Milo Murphy’s Law, an upcoming show brought to you from the creators of Phineas and Ferb.

Before making a career of art, Diana was going to be a politician. No forreals. While she’s been practicing art since high school, her college plan was to either go to UCLA and pursue history and art, or she was going to go to Georgetown and figure out how to go into politics. The way the cards played out, Diana ended up at UCLA, received a scholarship from the National Cartoonists Society, which led to a life-changing arts internship with Helioscope.

The Lonely Vincent Bellingham

The popular webcomic The Lonely Vincent Bellingham is a side project Diana has worked on since 2014. While she shared that this was more a “hobby” because most of her time is dedicated to work at Disney, it was obvious from early on in our interview that this is a passion project.

It’s not easy to provide a synopsis of what Lonely Vincent is about. On the one hand it could be said this is a webcomic about a main character who is lost in life, and trying to find himself through others. At the same time, this webcomic may be something much more. Listening to Diana in this interview, I got a good sense of how she’s actually the main character of the webcomic, and each of the other characters is a manifestation of who she is/wants to be. When asked to talk more about the characters in her webcomic, Diana shared how each character encapsulates a part of her upbringing, culture, and journey. Victoria encapsulates her fear of being alone, Luke draws from her experience growing up in immigrant communities, and Ursula presents issues of talent vs. hard work.

Currently The Lonely Vincent Bellingham is wrapping up Chapter 2. Diana has 20–21 chapters all planned out in her head already, and is hoping to finish this series in the next 5 years. Updates come out every 2 weeks or so, depending on Diana’s schedule.

Webcomics as a Medium

In a society where instant gratification is more and more normalized, I’m sure there are those out there who wonder why Diana uses the medium of a webcomic. I mean it’s taken 2 years to get to chapter 2, with 18+ more chapters to go! Hold your horses. Diana shared a few reasons why webcomics deserve a lot more credit.

There’s a joy I remember as a child of always knowing every certain day there would be a new page up to read.

If you create a good webcomic, you can build a community. Just like how fans can enjoy a comic once a month, and stay with that comic for years or even decades, so can be said about webcomics. Your fans will know consistently that each week a new page comes out to a larger adventure you are all on. Diana recommends the following to wet your appetite: Gunnerkrigg Court, Unsounded, and Agents of the Realm.

It opens up a chance for readers to have a dialogue on each specific page, versus waiting to only discuss a body of work as a whole.

Think about it. It’s not commonplace to ask you what you thought of page 4 of the latest Black Panther comic. Usually the discussion would revolve around what one thought of the entirety of the piece. Webcomics disrupt this. You are forced to view something separate from the whole. Not to say you can’t look at it as a whole once it is done, but this provides extra opportunity for you to engage others in discussion. This encourages a reader to go back and see what led to this specific page (just because it’s probably been a while). If you spend 12–15 hours per page (6 hours pencilling, 2 hours inking, 4 hours on coloring) like Diana does, on top of a full-time job, I’m sure it’s good to know that readers are appreciating your page for all the handwork you put into it!

Punching Up vs. Punching Down

As we are on this topic of how long it takes Diana to put together a page, she shared about some of the more personal reasons why it takes her longer at times. If you have ever perused the internet, you know that it’s a space for anyone to openly provide their two cents on anything. In tow with the positive feedback, Diana has had folks write cruel comments, troll, question her understanding of race, and more. Critiques are fine, but where do we draw the line? Do we end up putting a different standard for POC writers and artists? Do we put a different standard for POC women writers and artists?

I’m going to share a few quotes from Diana that I recorded, to dive a bit deeper on this. I think her quotes shed a lot on the thoughts of an Asian American woman in the comics realm.

I can’t speak from the experience of white creators, because they go through their own struggles, but it seems like they can see race as a skin tone and all they have to do is splash that on and make this one Korean or whatever. But for us, it’s so much harder because we know that we’re bearing the weight of representation. We can’t just make this character in a vacuum. It’s going to add to how people see us and we’ll be responsible for that.”

I draw at work, then I draw at home and instead of my webcomic being an escape for me, it became another stressful job.

Diana brought up the concept of “Punching Up vs. Punching Down,” in which she feels that instead of putting down POC comic writers/artists and their stories, we should be looking at the larger industry and figuring out how to do address the more system issues we’re seeing there. It is already so difficult for a POC woman to share her story through something like a comic; why are we adding an extra layer and making it even harder? As we say the stories being told are too white, what can we do to help support those who are trying to break the mold? This is not to say there should be no criticism at all. Diana is the first to admit that her work “isn’t going to be perfect,” and that she is open to critique. But what Diana shares, and what really remains with me from this interview, is that all this is complex and difficult to unpack; we really need to have a more open conversation of around art, representation, and accountability.

— -

This is a bit of a different format from my other interviews. When possible, I want to make the time to meet and talk with Asian Am/Pacific Islander comic writers and artists in person. As this blog does make a push for the need to support the work of Asian American/Pacific Islanders in the comics industry, we also need to learn more about who these folks are. A big thanks to Diana Huh for being a part of this!