Exclusive: First Second Announces ‘Displacement’

We’ve got some big news this morning: A new graphic novel announcement from First Second. Displacement, by Kiku Hughes, is a middle-grade graphic novel about family and history:

In 1942, Ernestina Teranishi and her parents were taken from their home in San Francisco and forced into an American concentration camp. They were among the 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry to be forcibly removed from the west coast of the United States.

Seventy-four years later, Ernestina’s granddaughter Kiku is experiencing a different kind of displacement. She is being pulled through time to different moments in Ernestina’s life. When she finds herself stuck in camp with the grandmother she never got to meet, she finally learns about a family history that was rarely spoken of at home.

Displacement is a story about actively reliving and reviving the past. The nation that forced Kiku’s family into camps in the 1940s looks eerily similar to the nation Kiku knows in 2016, and the more she understands about her family’s trauma, the more determined she is to do her part in preventing a repeat of it. Camp left scars on her family through the generations, and Kiku learns that healing comes from learning, sharing and fighting for change.

Here’s the author bio:

Kiku Hughes is a comic artist from the Seattle area. Her two great passions are science fiction and social justice. Her life’s mission is to incorporate both into every story she tells.

Hughes is the creator of the webcomic The Sublimes, and you can see some of her other comics on her Tumblr. Her work also appeared in the Elements anthology.

Displacement will be published in 2019. Here are some images from the book (click on image to enlarge):

Filed under: Graphic Novels