‘Giant Robot’ Is a Pop Culture Tome That’ll Take You Back to a Pre-Internet Age

Roving through the back of my magazine collection recently, I found a much-treasured copy of the second issue of short-lived Beastie Boys fanzine, Grand Royal. It dates to 1995. I remember excitedly buying it in an X-Large store in New York City and poring over every single page. Looking at it in 2024 however, took me aback. That zine now stands as a screaming monument to how much longer our attention spans were before the internet lived in our pockets.

I mention this because opening Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture for the first time gave me a similar sensation. The new hardcover collection of Giant Robot magazine’s highlights from the last three decades might look like a coffee table book on the outside, but on the inside, it’s a reflection of how we used to read. Page after page of densely packed text with minimal images to break up a font that often feels unreasonably small for pages of this size. (It all makes sense: Giant Robot did, after all, start life in 1994 as a fanzine.)

Facing down Giant Robot’s nearly 500 pages for the first time would be an intimidating exercise if not for the thoughtfulness of the book’s editors. Eric Nakamura, Francine Yulo, Tracy Hurren, Megan Tan and Tom Devlin clearly anticipated the attention span challenge and adapted accordingly. As such, the content here is split into color-coded categories — identity, cinema, comics and manga, music, travel, food, fashion, sports, toys, and art — thereby making it easy to locate your passion of choice and dive in with intention.

The cinema section contains the most recognizable names in the book, thanks to interviews with the likes of Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Taika Waititi, Dev Patel, John Woo, Freida Pinto, George Takei and Spirited Away legend Hayao Miyazaki. My personal favorite, however, is a Q&A with Gedde Watanabe (who played Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles), in which he bluntly shares his feelings about the problematic character he’s most famous for.

The music section sees stars like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Money Mark rubbing shoulders with more obscure artists. The 2007 remembrance here of Lance Hahn — San Francisco punk rock treasure, J Church vocalist and former Giant Robot contributor — almost knocked me down with a wave of bittersweet nostalgia. (The story also includes Bay Area folks from Jawbreaker, Aquarius Records and Fat Wreck Chords sharing quotes about Hahn’s life.)

The Hahn profile is just one of the ways Giant Robot reflects Bay Area culture, despite having always been based in Los Angeles. San Francisco’s Chinatown garners an article titled “The OG of American Chinatowns,” complete with an entire profile of Mr. Bing’s dive bar. There is a recollection of the student-led San Francisco State University strike of 1968. UC Berkeley radicals Richard Aoki, Harvey Dong, Steve Louie and Vicci Wong are also interviewed about historical Bay Area activism.

So too are there Bay Area figures peppered throughout. Margaret Cho contributes a particularly hilarious 1996 column titled “White Guys That Like Asian Girls.“ (Quote: “Andrew McCarthy is everything Asian girls like about white guys. Quietly handsome, not overly masculine, sweaty-palmed, neatly dressed in blues and grays and, when we want, really good at looking bewildered.”)

Then there’s the food section: so gloriously anarchic, it almost defies description. Just know that it includes a defense of MSG, a guide to Asian liquor, recipes that the Filipino inmates at L.A. County Jail made after hours in 2002, and a 1995 article about something called the “Cambodian Doughnut Cartel.”

So, yes. Do not let the enormity of Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture turn you off. Having this portable collection of Giant Robot’s back catalog isn’t just a treat, it also reflects how print media has changed and evolved during the age of the internet. (Unsurprisingly, those pages crammed with text dissipate as the years pass.) Even more importantly, this collection stands as an indispensable documentation of Asian American contributions to the culture, both mainstream and underground, over a very long period of time.

Best of all? It’s so entertaining, it’ll make you want to read like it’s still the ’90s.

‘Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture’ edited by Eric Nakamura, Francine Yulo, Tracy Hurren, Megan Tan and Tom Devlin is out on Oct. 21, 2024, from Drawn & Quarterly.

Eric Nakamura will be at San Francisco’s Silver Sprocket (1018 Valencia St.) for a booksigning on Oct. 26, 2024. He’ll also be in conversation with illustrator Felicia Chiao, artist Windy Chien and Jawbreaker drummer Adam Pfahler.