A Filipino-American take on Depression-era noir featuring mistaken identities, speakeasies, and lost love.
The year is 1929 and Bobot is just another migrant worker in rural California. Or rather, a migrant worker with a law degree from the Philippines reduced to manual labor in America. Bobot, like so many other young Filipinos, finds himself bunking in the fields picking fruit by day. When his cousin writes claiming to have spotted his estranged wife in nearby San Francisco, he swipes a co-worker’s favorite nightclub suit and heads to the big city to find her. What follows is classic noir with seedy dives, mouthy pool sharks, and obsession.
Spring 2023, 212 pp, Full color, $24.95 USD /$29.95 CAD
ISBN: 9781770466661
Praise for The Man in the McIntosh Suit
“Tight, compelling, evocative, Rina Ayuyang’s The Man in the McIntosh Suit transports us to a colonial-era Philippines and a California of migrant workers and hardscrabble opportunities, set to a soundtrack of loss and 1920s love songs. She vividly reminds us that the Filipino Dream was once the American Dream, and that both are but the shared aspiration of humanity towards a better future.
—Miguel Syjuco, author of the Man Asia Literary Prize winner Illustrado
“A fast-paced thriller of a story combining history with heartbreak, Rina Ayuyang’s graphic novel mixes Manong lore with an individual’s dreams.”
—Gina Apostol, author of Insurrecto
“Rina Ayuyang’s The Man in the McIntosh Suit is a cracking good story, and also a moving account of becoming American, with all of the peril, loss and pain it entailed for 20th century Filipino immigrants. Ayuyang undergirds her lively art, full of cinematic pizazz, with a thoughtfully designed plot and a memorable hero.”
—Megan Kelso, creator of Who Will Make the Pancakes: Five Stories
Sample Pages
Rina Ayuyang 