Graphic novel looks at anti-Asian hate

In the new graphic novel "Cyclopedia Exotica," immigrants with one eye coexist uneasily with their two-eyed neighbors.

Members of the cyclops community are targeted by curious online daters and porn addicts as well as cosmetic surgeons eager to give them that desirable two-eyed look. They contend with xenophobes protesting mixed marriages, hateful comments from subway Karens and, in some cases, physical violence.

In 2018, when artist and author Aminder Dhaliwal began sharing pages of the book with her nearly 250,000 Instagram followers, she was drawing from her experiences as a South Asian woman growing up in England and Canada, but she wondered if the topic was relevant.

"I remember saying to a friend, 'I want to do a book on microaggressions, but that's, like, so old. Is it even worth doing?' " said Dhaliwal, who now lives in California.

Three years on, Dhaliwal's book seems particularly of the moment. It's tough to miss the parallels between its characters, minorities singled out because of their eyes, and the spate of reported attacks on Asian people in the United States over the past months.

"I could not imagine that this would be happening this year," she said. "A lot of the microaggression stuff was specifically about Asians, but I also get questions like, 'Is this about queer people?' Or, 'I relate to this so much as a trans person.' "

When she was 11, her family moved from London, where she was born, to a predominantly Asian suburb of Toronto. She loved to draw from an early age, tracing the covers of her brother's video game cases and creating Harry Potter fan art. She knew she wanted to do something art-related but wasn't sure what she could do or whom to even ask.

Inspired by a presentation given by a Disney "Beauty and the Beast" animator, Dhaliwal enrolled in the animation department at local Sheridan College.

"He was this larger guy with a big old beard, and he flips a switch and he's Belle," she said. "It was just bananas to me. I knew at that moment that I wanted to dedicate my life to this craft, because it just seemed so fun and silly."

After graduation, Dhaliwal found work in Los Angeles as a writer and artist on animated shows like "The Fairly OddParents" and "Sanjay and Craig." After working for four years on a pilot for an animated series that never got picked up, she knew she had to create her own comics, things she could post online for immediate feedback.

She started with a Harry Potter spoof, then a tongue-in-cheek comic based on the Japanese manga series "Death Note." In 2018, her critically acclaimed debut novel, "Woman World," was published. It imagined an idyllic, supremely chill future in which guys went extinct years ago. (Spoiler alert: They aren't really missed.)

The success of "Woman World" gave Dhaliwal new confidence.

"Cyclopedia Exotica" is her second book. Its inspiration wasn't originally political.

"I wish I could tell you there was some really beautiful reason," Dhaliwal said. "But truly, I just found cyclopes so interesting. So often they just look like people, except for their one defining feature. The first thing I remember sketching were pinup drawings of cyclopes, and it went from monsters in erotica to looking at how minorities find acceptance through being attractive."

In the book, cyclopes deal with being perceived as overly submissive, the lack of cyclops representation in Hollywood movies and worries about whether mixed children will have one eye or two.

"Aminder has always been so observant about everything," said friend and fellow animator Megan Nicole Dong ("How to Train Your Dragon 2").

"She's also friends with so many people, and so many different kinds of people, that all of these things in her book feel very authentic, because they're either based on things she's experienced or things her family and friends have gone through."

"People die for beauty, because they feel they don't look a certain way," she said. "But so often people trivialize beauty and say things like, 'You need to get over it,' or, 'You need to be OK with yourself.'

"That's the message animation shows always try to tell kids," she continued. "Be true to yourself. But I think that can be really hard to swallow when the world has punished you so often for being who you are."