Over at Newsarama, Michael C. Lorah interviews Gene Yang and Derek Kirk Kim about their book, The Eternal Smile, coming out in April from First Second Books.

At the end of the interview, Gene throws out a little plug for his story "The Blue Scorpion and Chung" which will be featured in Secret Identities.

Speaking of "The Blue Scorpion," catch an all-new "motion comic" preview of the story at the Secret Identities blog, or view it embedded below:

As an added bonus, SI Managing Editor (and motion comic director) has a behind-the-scenes video documenting how the whole thing came together:

Find both videos at the official Secret Identities YouTube channel.

Derek Kirk Kim notes that Gene Yang is the latest cartoonist to be tapped to create a strip for the New York Times Magazine! The first four installments of Yang's "Prime Baby" can be downloaded in pdf form directly from the NYT site.

(Incidentally, Kim has an awesome blog right here on which he posts photographs of his cartoon daily journal. Check it out!)

Funny excerpt:

... it was surprising when Gene Yang's graphic novel, "American Born Chinese" was nominated for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2006.

And nobody was more surprised than Yang.

"When I first started publishing 'American Born Chinese,' it was a mini comic," he said. "I would finish a chapter, take it to Kinko's and Xerox it and sell it at different comic book conventions. My big plan was to just get it collected as a graphic novel and that would be it."

"I do get some reactions to the Cousin Chin-Kee that worry me a little bit," said Yang, who will be discussing and signing "American Born Chinese" and his other books at Big Planet Comics in Bethesda on Wednesday. "There's some people that come up and tell me, 'He's so cute, so funny, endearing.' That's definitely not what I was going for,"

Yang believes that most people understood the purpose of a character like Chin-Kee -- acting as the juxtaposition against his popular, assimilated cousin.

"I think the vast majority of the responses are positive, but I have had some Asian-Americans and come up and tell me I was perpetuating the stereotype by explicitly showing it," he said.