May is AAPI Heritage Month, and DC is celebrating in style with a brand-new lineup of AAPI superheroes under the We Are Legends banner, a family of new comics written and drawn by Asian creative teams. City Boy, created by Greg Pak, Minkyu Jung and Sunny Gho, tells the story of Cameron Kim, a young man with the remarkable ability to actually communicate with the cities he inhabits. Cameron was first introduced back in the WildStorm 30th Anniversary Special where he faced off against another city-related hero, Jack Hawksmoor of the Authority, but this time he's all on his own. Though, whether or not he's ready to stand up and be a hero in earnest remains to be seen.

To get a little more insight into Cameron, his powers, and just what we can expect from City Boy as the story evolves, we spoke with writer Greg Pak, who shed some light on Cameron's past, present and future.

I'm such a huge fan of heroes with more off-the-wall abilities and powers and I think Cameron definitely fits the bill. Can you give us a rundown of how his city-speaking powers work and what fans should expect from him?

Cameron has the ability to tap into the consciousness of any city he's in, which gives him access to all the city's secrets and sometimes even control the infrastructure of the city in spectacular ways. I don't want to spoil all of the ways Cameron uses his powers, but I can say that he starts small, basically scrounging for little lost treasures to pawn, but things amp up pretty quickly and the stakes will get enormously high. I'll also note that the cities have their own consciousness and free will, so exactly what Cameron is able to do at any given moment may depend on the nature of his bond with any given city. Lots of room for interesting dynamics!

We first met Cameron in the WildStorm 30th Anniversary Special, being matched up with Jack Hawksmoor for obvious city-related reasons. What made that the perfect vehicle to introduce City Boy as both a character and a concept to the DCU?

Jack Hawksmoor is probably DC's most prominent pre-existing character with a bond with cities, so it made a ton of sense to have him bump up against Cameron, so we can see the similarities and differences between the characters and get a sense of Cameron's unique place in the DC Universe. One big reveal that I'll go ahead and spoil here is that Cameron's bond with cities is supernatural instead of strictly scientific, so he baffles Hawksmoor a bit.

Even more importantly, Cameron's backstory and motivations are very different from Hawksmoor and many other heroes. Cameron's fundamentally a hustler—an underdog scrambling to survive in a bleak world. So, when his abilities force him to consider things bigger than himself, he comes to heroism with a lot of ambivalence, which is a fun dynamic to play with. Cameron also has a genuine dark side under that scrappy, cocky demeanor, and we'll see how dangerous that becomes as the stakes get raised.

Are there other characters you'd like him to team-up with in the future?

One of the biggest on my list is coming up in issue #3: Superman! In terms of powers, I love that Cameron and Clark both have access to more information about what's going on around them than is probably good for anyone's mental health—and both have to consider all kinds of moral and ethical questions as a result. At the same time, I love that Clark's basically lawful good and Cameron is deeply, instinctively chaotic, so their ways of dealing with the world and their responsibilities are very different. That's all solid gold for storytelling, and I can't wait till we can share that issue with folks!

Can you talk a little about working with an art team like Minkyu Jung and Sunny Gho to create this character?

I'm incredibly fortunate to have amazing creative partners on this book, including Minkyu, Sunny, letterer Wes Abbott and editor Jessica Chen. Developing the look and vibe for Cameron and his powers has been an absolute group effort. Jessica suggested taking Korean street fashion as an inspiration, and Minkyu absolutely ran with it and came up with a tremendous design. And when it comes to Cameron's powers, there's a lot of subtle magic going on and everyone on the team is making it all come to life so beautifully!

And to follow-up, what was the process of nailing down the visuals for his abilities? I love the sort of X-Ray vision/videogame map we see in this issue.

Yeah, Minkyu gave those "City Vision" x-ray images a great gritty vibe and Sunny nailed it with the bluish tint. I love that it's not crystal clear; it's hazy and glowy and evocative, which keeps things a little suspenseful and makes it feel like Cameron's peeking into something he shouldn't be, which is great for drama and the story.

In this first issue we get to see a bit of the event that gave Cameron his powers, but we also get to see a bit of his childhood and I can't help but feel like there's a lot more to both of these stories. Is that something we're going to explore more?

Absolutely. The more we worked out the details of Cameron's backstory, the more I loved the combination of a deeply personal emotional story of an abandoned child combined with a big, fantastical, comic book origin story involving occult science. We'll continue to shed more light on all of those elements as the story continues, and small things will indeed pay off in big ways.

Speaking of his childhood, it was interesting to see a story like this kicking off in Metropolis rather than somewhere like Gotham or Blüdhaven. What made Metropolis your pick?

We did get to put Cameron in Gotham in a short story in the Lazarus Planet: Legends Reborn one-shot. And that's a tremendous location for more adventures with City Boy—we'll be back there soon enough!

But Metropolis just felt right for Cameron's origin story and the first few issues of the series. It all ties thematically into the idea of the city and what it means. Metropolis is DC's great, shining city—the city of tomorrow, the city of hope. So, it feels like an incredible place for bonding and community. But like every big city, it can also be a terrible place where people can get lost forever. Cameron's story plays with all of that, so it's a fantastic place for our story to begin.

Without spoiling anything, we leave the first issue with a pretty big cliffhanger! Tease a little of what we can expect as the miniseries continues because Cameron looks like he's going to be in for a pretty rough ride.

One of the glorious things about working on this book and exploring this theme of cities is that once we started really digging in, we saw all kinds of threads and connections to wider DC mythology that we didn't imagine from the beginning but that made absolute, perfect sense. DC has always featured cities in tremendous ways, as characters in their own right, so there's going to be something awesome to discover and play with in whatever location Cameron visits.

But on an even bigger scale, there are certain DC villains with a certain interest in cities who would naturally have a tremendous interest in Cameron and his powers. I don't want to spoil anything for people who haven’t yet read the issue, but one of the biggest DC villains of all time has an eye on Cameron for reasons that should be terrifyingly obvious once you think about it for a minute, and the story that results is gonna be an inferno.
 

City Boy #1 by Greg Pak, Minkyu Jung and Sunny Gho is now available in print and on DC UNIVERSE INFINITE.