Lela Lee

While a sophomore at UC Berkeley, Lela Lee first created Angry Little Asian Girl after viewing offensive and chauvinistic cartoons at a Festival of Animation. Her friend took notice of her intense anger and challenged her to make a cartoon about herself. That night, she stayed up drawing with typing paper and markers. Using the video editing equipment from a class, the first episode, “The First Day of School,” starring the “Angry Little Asian Girl” was born.

Years later, after pulling the video out of a dusty drawer, the five angry episodes were given sparkling reviews by the LA Times and the LA Weekly. Lee was encouraged by the reception and decided to make a batch of 300 shirts. Her friends bought the initial shirts, and soon Lee’s phone was ringing off the hook with requests for more. This prompted her to create a website and create more characters to include angry girls of other ethnicities. Thus Angry Little Girls came to be.

Angry Little Girls is now a released book of collected comics distributed worldwide. In the first month of its release, the book went into its fourth printing. Lee now has licensees for greeting cards, magnets, postcards, calendars, t-shirts, and handbags in the US and abroad, and more books are in the works.

Lee was born in Los Angeles, CA and raised in a conservative suburb. She was ridiculed and humiliated as a child for something she could not help: her gender and her ethnicity. Those experiences influence her comic strip.

“The sole reason I created this comic strip, is to address everything that I had to go through growing up. My teachers and parents couldn’t coach me through the racism I got as a child. They were too afraid. No one wants to talk about racism, overt or slight. But with this comic strip, now I can. The reason I keep drawing this comic strip is because not only do I really feel strongly about the subject matter, but with the positive feedback I have gotten, it has made me understand that I have hit on a nerve of some sort.”

Lee is also an actress and has played series regular “Jodi Chang” on the SciFi series Tremors and has been a recurring character on Scrubs. She has guest starred on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Will & Grace, Charmed, Friends, Felicity, and Rude Awakenings, among others.