Derek Kirk Kim (born 1974/1975) is a
Korean-American comics artist and filmmaker.
Personal life
Derek Kirk Kim was born in
South Korea in 1974 or 1975, and moved to the United States at age eight. From
Pacifica, California, by 2005 he was living in
San Francisco.[1] There, Kim attended the
Academy of Art University where he majored in
illustration, though he later wished he had attended "a regular school so I could have gotten a more rounded education and been exposed to different subjects."[2]
Career
Kim began publishing semi-autobiographical serialized short stories on his website, lowbright.com, in 2000. Some of those stories from 2000 to 2003 were collected by Kim and published in Same Difference and Other Stories,[3] an award-winning publication that he later said kick-started his professional career. Through the early 2010s, Kim described himself as being singularly focused on writing and drawing comics.[2]
For his character, Andy Go, an art-school
dropout who finds himself trapped in a world that outlawed creativity,[2] Kim began branching out by 2012. In the webcomic Tune, Kim stepped back from drawing volume two and instead brought on artist
Les McClaine to take over those duties—Kim could no longer handle the monotony of the drawing, and instead preferred to focus on production and writing. In the live-action YouTube series Mythomania, a impetus for which was the
casting–whitewashing controversy in 2010's
The Last Airbender, Kim found he enjoyed
filmmaking more than drawing.[4]
In 2005,
NPR's
Jacki Lyden noted that, like Kim, both main characters in Same Difference are
Korean-American, though she felt they did not exhibit any explicitly-Korean attributes; Kim told her that he avoided obvious or stereotypical signifiers of their Asianness, instead grafting similar scenes as he and his Korean-American friends had while growing up.[1] In a 2013 interview by
Gene Luen Yang for
First Second Books, Kim agreed that, in addition to many of his main characters being
Asian-American, he consciously imbued his work with an "Asian American-ness", though was saddened it needed to be conscious: "The default race for a central character shouldn't have to be
white."[7]
In November 2001, Kim was highlighted and praised in The Comics Journal for his serials Same Difference and Half Empty—then hosted on
GeoCities.[13] In September 2004,
Shaenon K. Garrity reviewed his body of work for The Webcomics Examiner, and heaped praise on the artist, explicitly calling out his "technical precision and emotional expressiveness."[9]
In September 2002, the
Xeric Foundation awarded Kim a self-publishing grant for Same Difference and Other Stories.[14] For his publication thereof,[15] Kim received a 2003
Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent, a 2004
Eisner Award for Name Deserving of Wider Recognition, and a 2004
Harvey Award for Best New Talent.[1] The third story in 2009's The Eternal Smile, "Urgent Request", earned Kim a 2010
Eisner Award for Best Short Story.[15]