Marvel's New Editor-In-Chief, A White Guy, Used To Pretend He Was Japanese
NOT A GREAT LOOK
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The Friday before Thanksgiving, Marvel Entertainment​ announced that longtime Marvel staffer C.B. Cebulski will be the media company's new editor-in-chief. Now, Cebulski is under fire after admitting that he wrote Japanese-influenced comics under a Japanese pseudonym more than a decade ago. Here's what's going on.

Cebulski Was Previously An Editor And Brand Manager At Marvel

As an editor at Marvel, Cebulski negotiated publishing agreements in Asia and was responsible for publishing "Runaways," the popular book series that was recently adapted into a Hulu show.

After a stint as a translator and a freelance writer, Mr. Cebulski joined Marvel full time in 2002 as an associate editor. In 2011, he became the vice president of international brand management for the company. In his new role, Mr. Cebulski will be responsible for the editorial and creative side of Marvel's publishing division. His duties will include recruiting new talent and helping shape the ongoing sagas of the company's heroes.

[The New York Times]

On Tuesday, Cebulski Admitted That He Wrote Comics Under The Name 'Akira Yoshida' In The Mid-2000s

Cebulski was rumored for years to have written under the pseudonym Akira Yoshida in the mid-2000s. Yoshida was byline on a number of Marvel series, including "Thor: Son Of Asgard" and "Wolverine: Soultaker" in 2004 and 2005. On Tuesday, Cebulski finally admitted that he was Yoshida in a statement to the website Bleeding Cool, writing,

I stopped writing under the pseudonym Akira Yoshida after about a year. It wasn't transparent, but it taught me a lot about writing, communication and pressure. I was young and naïve and had a lot to learn back then. But this is all old news that has been dealt with, and now as Marvel's new Editor-in-Chief, I'm turning a new page and am excited to start sharing all my Marvel experiences with up and coming talent around the globe.

[via Bleeding Cool]

Cebulski Broke A Marvel Rule Forbidding Staffers From Writing Or Drawing For The Publisher

Cebulski's pseudonym allowed him to get around a Marvel rule preventing staffers from writing for the publisher.

The con began when Cebulski needed to establish a writing career while still at Marvel. He started out with smaller gigs like writing "Conan and the Demons of Khitai" for Dark Horse Comics and then got noticed and hired by another Marvel editor.

Doing so violated Marvel's ethics policy against letting editors write or draw comic books but by using the name Yoshida, Cebulski was able to skirt this rule while seemingly adding a layer of authenticity to telling Japanese-influenced stories. Marvel even boasted of this appearance of diversity, saying that it was uncommon for a non-Anglophone writer to succeed in the US.

[The Verge]

As 'Yoshida,' Cebulski Claimed He Was A Japanese Man Who Learned English From Comics

Yoshida wasn't just a pseudonym — Cebulski concocted an entire fake identity around the name, doing interviews as Yoshida and claiming that he was a Japanese national. Here's the story he gave CBR for a profile in 2005:

Yoshida grew up in Japan reading manga. Since his father was in international business, he spent parts of his childhood living in the U.S. where he learned English by reading superhero comics and watching TV and movies. As a child, the writer said he always wanted to work in either the Japanese manga or American comics industry. Fortunately, he's had the privilege of doing both as an adult. 

Yoshida started his career in editorial at a small Japanese comic publisher named Fujimi Shobo. It was there that he got to meet writers and manga artists like Ryo Mizuno ("Record of Lodoss War") and Kia Asamiya ("Silent Mobius"). The company was eventually bought out by a larger publisher, but the contacts Yoshida made proved helpful.

[CBR]

Cebulski Has Come Under Fire For Cultural Appropriation

Many Marvel fans and critics have criticized Cebulski for engaging in "yellowface" and appropriating a culture that wasn't his to begin with. io9 staff writer Charles Pulliam-Moore succinctly explained the problem with Cebulski's inhabitation of a Japanese persona in a comment on his story about the controversy.

Western culture has spent hundreds of years letting white men write the narratives — both fictional and real — focused on cultures that are not their own and in doing so, allowed for inaccuracies, and a romanticized fetishization to become part of the way we as a society see those cultures. This manifests itself in a number of ways including, but not limited to racist stereotypes becoming popularized in our depictions of those cultures or the broad normalization of racist ideas or phrases like "opening the kimono."

One of the easiest and most effective ways at beginning to correct this kind of longstanding problem is to simply have people from those cultures write those stories. It isn't an "innate magical connection," but rather the absence of a perspective that's fundamentally informed by whiteness first.

[io9]


Others have commented on the shallowness of Cebulski's portrayals of Japanese culture in comics he wrote under the false name — the following tweet includes panels from an issue of 2005's "Wolverine: Soultaker."

 

One Of Cebulski's Colleagues Has Defended Him As 'Culturally Sensitive'

Marvel hasn't released an official statement on the controversy, but Marvel's director of content and character development, Sana Amanat, came to Cebulski's defense in an interview with Channel NewsAsia. Amanat is the Pakistani-American writer and editor behind the new Pakistani-American "Ms. Marvel."

"This is a world he understood. He's one of my favourite people (and) I think many people who know CB will know that he is one of the most globally minded, and very culturally sensitive as well," Amanat, who is currently in Singapore for the Asia TV Forum and Market, told Channel NewsAsia on Wednesday (Nov 29).

"That man has lived in Japan, speaks Japanese, and has lived all over the world. He very much associates with Japanese culture. And I think that him writing, for whatever time it was, was him trying to be a writer more than anything else."

Amanat added: "I think we have to be very sensitive about cultural appropriation and whitewashing. But I do think, fundamentally, that if there's an opportunity to create more awareness about a particular type of character, whether it's an Asian character or a black character, that should be our primary goal — telling as authentic, as honest, as fun, as real a story as possible about that character."

[Channel NewsAsia]

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