George Takei Memoir ‘They Called Us Enemy’ Coming in Summer 2019

With immigration and the detention of migrant children in the news, IDW Publishing has announced details of They Called Us Enemy, a graphic novel memoir of George Takei’s childhood in American internment camps.

To be released in summer 2019, They Called Us Enemy will be co-written by Takei, Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, with art from Harmony Becker. Its plot revisits the actor and activist’s childhood as one of 120,000 Japanese Americans held in American concentration camps run by the United States during the Second World War.

According to the publisher’s official description, the book is “Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the terrors and small joys of childhood in the shadow of legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s tested faith in democracy and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do?”

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“It has always been my mission in life to raise the awareness of the unjust imprisonment of Japanese Americans in barbed-wire prison camps during World War II,” Takei told The Hollywood Reporter. “But I had no idea how chillingly relevant that dark chapter of American history would be to our times today.”

The project, to be released by IDW’s Top Shelf Productions, was originally announced last year, but both the project’s title and artist had remained under wraps until now. IDW  also released the critically acclaimed March trilogy, a graphic novel memoir co-written by Rep. John Lewis.

Co-writers Eisinger and Scott will be discussing the project during a Friday panel at the convention: “The Human Condition: Connecting Humanity With Graphic Novels,” at 1 p.m. in Room 23ABC, where they will share more of Becker’s artwork.