In 1994, Los Angeles native Eric Nakamura photocopied 240 copies of his first fanzine. Nakamura, then 25, had no inkling that Giant Robot would determine the direction of his life for the next three decades. Very little was planned, yet his zine would expand to a bimonthly magazine, retail stores on both coasts, a restaurant, an art gallery, and a podcast.

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Now there’s a book: Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture (Drawn and Quarterly). The subtitle is a mouthful, but then so is Nakamura’s résumé, which also includes the job of art curator. Nakamura organizes shows for his own GR2 Gallery as well as the fifth Giant Robot Biennale at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighborhood. Artists like David Choe, Barry McGee, Matt Furie, Adrian Tomine, Yoskay Yamamoto, Takashi Murakami, and Luke Chueh were featured in the magazine before it ceased printing, in 2011.

The book republishes stories from Giant Robot’s 68-issue run from 1994 to 2011, along with an introduction by Claudine Ko and contributions from Randall Park, Margaret Cho, Daniel Wu, and Jia Tolentino. The photography from that period still looks fresh, and the writing—a mix of casual snark and in-depth research—remains sharp.

Reading the anthology brought me back to my 20s as a Gen X Chinese American forming an identity at a time when obscure cultural knowledge (and consumption) was a form of social capital. I appreciated that Giant Robot did not pearl-clutch or make sweeping declarations about the state of Asian America. It was a given that this product was always meant for outsiders and that the outside was a better place anyway.

I talked with Nakamura, whom I’ve known since 1995, in the Los Angeles storefront on Sawtelle Boulevard that he’s had since 2003. (Our interview was occasionally interrupted by the sounds of a work crew finally updating the bathroom for the first time in this lease.) We were within a few blocks of West Los Angeles known as Little Osaka, where many Japanese Americans relocated after leaving the concentration camps they were forced into during World War II.

Third-generation Japanese American Nakamura grew up in this neighborhood; his parents met on this very street. He reps this region hard, even serving for a time on the Sawtelle Neighborhood Council. From 2005 to 2012, Nakamura had a restaurant, gr/eats, next door.

When he started Giant Robot, Nakamura was a long-haired punk photographer fresh out of UCLA’s East Asian Studies department (after a stint at San Francisco State) with scant knowledge of publishing outside of working for VideoGames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine, a magazine published by Larry Flynt. As associate editor, he played video games, did interviews, and wrote reviews while still working at his mother’s restaurant.

The scrappy, photocopied early issues set a tone for what the magazine would cover: Asian candies, punk rock, Hong Kong cinema, skateboarding.

At the time, small-time publishers relied on institutional guides like Factsheet Five and distribution channels like Tower Records to reach their readers. Giant Robot found its audience at the tail end of the zine craze, eventually giving up its cut-and-paste aesthetic in favor of going glossy.

As Giant Robot professionalized almost despite itself, Nakamura and his team maintained a seat-of-the-pants quality that ensured that they’d never sell out, even as the whole operation leveled up. “It’s punk rock. We’re moving forward, whatever it is,” he says of the early magazine years. Giant Robot retained some of the sensibility of its early days, when Nakamura and cofounder and editor Martin Wong were seen as Asian American bad boys thumbing their noses at mainstream culture. In the prelude to a 1999 interview with animation giant Hayao Miyazaki, Nakamura writes, “I sat with the cheerful graying father of an old school of anime…while New York Times maggots listened by the door, hoping to poach my questions.” Sometimes their editorial instincts came in conflict with the business, as when a 1996 feature on Asian pornography got the magazine kicked out of the Japanese American National Museum bookstore. (All is forgiven: the museum now hosts the Giant Robot Biennales.)

A zine piece that drew attention and crystalized the project is “Return to Manzanar,” where Nakamura and Chinese American Wong photographed themselves skateboarding in the ruins of the infamous California incarceration camp that held Japanese Americans like Nakamura’s own father (who was confined in Arizona’s Poston camp). It may seem flippant, but it also managed to transform a heartbreaking legacy into something playful while also educating the magazine’s young audience. No one in the ’90s was dropping the phrase generational trauma, but readers were processing that through these creative acts.

Another essential piece was a 1997 oral history of the Yellow Power, a movement of Asian American activists of the ’70s. Many of its subjects are no longer alive, and it’s fascinating to hear from Yuri Kochiyama, who was present at the assassination of Malcolm X, and Black Panther Richard Masato Aoki, who was posthumously proven to be an FBI informant. This section and the Manzanar piece are reminders that while the magazine was never overtly political in the way that ’70s UCLA publication Gidra was, radicalism was a part of its DNA.

The magazine also championed films and actors before they ever got play in mainstream publications, including Michelle Yeoh, Tony Leung, and Chow Yun Fat, who mixed with American cover stars like Margaret Cho and Jenny Shimizu.

Another legendary Giant Robot piece was a 2002 collaboration between cartoonist Adrian Tomine and Claudine Ko interviewing Sixteen Candles actor Gedde Watanabe. Watanabe portrayed Long Duk Dong, a buffoonish stereotype that haunted many Asian males growing up, including Tomine. Tomine and Ko try to hold the actor accountable for the bad representation while acknowledging Watanabe’s lack of agency and how few viable roles there were for Asian actors in the 1980s.

In the years since the magazine folded, Nakamura and artist Luke Chueh (cover artist of the last print issue) have cohosted a podcast called Robot and the Bear. The cohosts have a shambolic charm, presiding over rambling interviews with guests from the art world.

The format may change, but the ethos of Giant Robot lives as long as Nakamura keeps the lights on. Now 55, he has somehow sustained his interest in the same project for more than half his life. “I think if I burn out, you wouldn’t know,” he tells me. “I just keep going. I mean, it’s not that difficult to just keep going.”

“True burnout is if you just bail,” he says. “I’m not doing that.”•