Award-winning cartoonist Shing Yin Khor in August will publish a 160-page graphic memoir about her experiences during a journey on Route 66.
The main title is “The American Dream?” with the subtitle “A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito.”
Khor grew up in Malaysia and held different ideas about Route 66 than many typical Americans. Paste magazine reported:
On one hand, Khor, like many, knew the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. On the other, Khor feared Steinbeck’s bleaker America: a barren landscape populated by impoverished people, broken-down cars and shattered dreams. The American Dream?: A Journey on Route 66 is Khor’s attempt, now that she calls Los Angeles home, to confront both sides of America by traveling the entire expanse of that iconic road, beginning in Santa Monica and ending in Chicago. And what begins as a road trip (with small dog in tow) ends up as something more like a pilgrimage in search of an American landscape that seems forever shifting, forever out of place.
“Route 66 has always been the quintessential American road trip in my head, and I don’t know where that idea came from, other than the decades of American media that definitely repeated that it was,” Khor said in a statement. “For me, it felt like driving it all would be a goalpost for establishing my American-ness, on the same level as having to study 100 civics questions for the citizenship naturalization test—even though they are both things that the majority of Americans haven’t done.”
Paste also posted a few exclusive excerpts from Khor’s upcoming publication here, including an image of the 66 Motel sign in Needles, California.
The graphic novel may be preordered here. It’s available in Kindle format, paperback and library binding.
(Cover image of “The American Dream?: A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito”)