AAPI Month Speaker: Tak Toyoshima , Creator of “Secret Asian Man”

Born and raised in NYC’s Tribeca neighborhood, Tak Toyoshima is an American cartoonist with over three decades of experience in the comic book industry and is a veteran of public speaking for over 20 years. He is the creator/artist of the comic strip "Secret Asian Man." Starting as a two-page monthly in a Boston-based arts magazine, "Secret Asian Man" became a weekly comic strip for the next six years. In the fall of 2006, "Secret Asian Man" was scouted by United Features Syndicate ("Peanuts," "Dilbert," and "Boondocks") and developed to launch in July of 2007 as the first Asian American comic strip since the days of Bruce Lee and Charlie Chan. The Daily Days, a collection of “Secret Asian Man” daily syndicated comic strips, has gone into its second printing to celebrate Toyoshima’s 25th anniversary of creating SAM.

Among other creator owned projects, Toyoshima created Kwok, a self-published short story fundraiser to assist Asian seniors in the wake of the surge of xenophobic anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. In 2023, he published Make Good Choices, a choose-your-own adventure book where readers navigate their way through challenging topics such as gun violence, critical race theory, police brutality, and abortion. His literary agent is currently shopping around a YA graphic novel memoir about Toyoshima’s upbringing in NYC. Toyoshima has worked on many other comic art related projects and publications insupport of marginalized communities including Secret Identities: An Asian American Superhero Anthology, New Frontiers: The Many Worlds of George Takei, APB: Artists Against Police Brutality, But Enough About Me written by NBC news anchor Richard Lui, and any more. When not working on his own creations, he is the Art and Communications director for MICE (Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo), New England’s premier comic book convention for creators outside of the mainstream superhero world, celebrating its 16th year in 2025. Now living in the Boston area, in his spare time, Toyoshima teaches a weekly comics and sequential arts class to middle school aged kids in Massachusetts' south shore area where he was awarded Instructor of the Year.

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Host or Publisher School of Visual Arts Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion