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Eagle: The Making of an Asian American President.

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Eagle: The Making of an Asian American President. Kaiji Kawaguchi. Adapt. Carl Gustav Horn. Trans. Yuji Oniki. 5 Vols. San Francisco: Viz Comics, 2000-2002. Vol. 1,414 pages; Vol. 2, 414 pages; Vol. 3,416 pages; Vol. 4, 512 pages; Vol. 5, 586 pages. $19.95 each for Vols. 1-3; $22.95 for Vols. 4 and 5.

In his now famous keynote speech for the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama has said that an election is about our decision to participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope, and that hope, to him, is represented by "a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too." With aspirations for the presidency himself, the implicit suggestion of Obama's remark is that America should prove itself enlightened enough to elect someone "with a funny name" to the nation's highest office. Kaiji Kawaguchi's manga series, Eagle: The Making of an Asian American President, seems to have been conceived with these sentiments in mind. Eagle follows the fictional election campaign of Kenneth Yamaoka, a third-generation Japanese American seeking to become the forty-third president of the United States. Told primarily from the perspective of Takashi Jo, a Japanese journalist who is also Yamaoka's illegitimate son, Eagle offers an...

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