Hello, all! I have a short, 6-page colour manga/comic out with KOOKIE magazine called “The Heartsmith“, which is available in issue #6 (March 2019). It’s a lovely little all ages story for girls aged 8+, and it’s about heartbreak and the strength between different generations of women. I got sent two copies of KOOKIE, and the colours turned out lovely in print! Buy the magazine here!
The best thing about researching visual sources for Wu Zetian is that she has been meticulously documented in multiple TV dramas and movies (check Wikipedia for that full list).
There has been a number of pop cultural productions of Wu’s life story, but in terms of historical accuracy, the most reliable is probably the 1995 TV series “Wu Zetian” (starring Liu Xiaoqing). Being produced by the Chinese government means that the accuracy factor was probably quite strict, and so I drew some cues from it for my art. You can watch the entire series on Youtube.
Above is an example of the artwork I did that used cues from the 1995 “Wu Zetian” TV series. However, I should stress that I took some artistic liberties with the depictions, for my own ease. An example would be the last panel (pg15), which shows Wu Zetian sitting in on court sessions behind a screen next to Gaozong. In real history, the screen was behind Gaozong, not next to him, but that would have been impossible to show properly in a comic panel, so I moved it. On the other hand, after Gaozong’s death (pg20), Wu did move the screen from behind the throne to next to it.
The TV series covered most of my art sources, so the rest of it I got from the book “China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty” by Charles Benn (2002), Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hi everyone! It’s been a while I’ve posted, but the good news is that Reuters wrote an article on me and my (feminist) comics on historical queens. It was a good interview too, with many thanks to Michael Taylor. It’s super-gratifying to have my work acknowledged.
This is a poem by Indonesian poet Omar Musa, which I was asked to adapt into comics form by the Cordite Poetry review from a while ago. Here it is, finally, in its full form.
Omar Musa’s poem “The Rooster” is an exploration of masculinity, mostly about the difference between a man’s perception of himself, and of the man’s actual reality. For that reason, I’ve divided the poem into 2 ‘columns’, the left showing the man/rooster as he actually is, and the right hand side showing the man/rooster as how he sees himself.
There are, however, two things that occupy the entire width of the page – neutral scenes of nature, and the parang, which is a reference to death. Since death and nature takes everybody in the end, these things straddle both columns.
A rooster is a common, traditional representation of manhood, so when the rooster (as a symbol) is ultimately killed and discovered to be simple-minded and hollow, the meaning of the poem is quite clear. In a way, I saw the poem as about the de-throning of masculinity. So on the left-hand side, the rooster is depicted as old and mangy, where as in the right-hand side, the rooster clearly sees itself as strong and powerful.
The same applies to the depiction of the man (the narrator) in the story. Since this is an Australian poem, I wanted to work some themes of migrants and displacement into it. On the right-hand side, the image of the man is that of a white, patriarchal kind of figure, meant to represent the “Aussie battler”, which is still a very common depiction of a “typical, Australian male”. On the left hand side is an older, non-white man, which I think is a better representation of the changing face of Australia. However, despite Australia’s racial melting-pot, people still tend to see the “quintessential” Australian male as a “white, blue-collar, fair-dinkum” sort of bloke, which I think is a stereotype that at least needs to be changed, if not torn down.
Last of all, is the ‘blood on the cuffs’ at the end. This as represents a ‘lingering remnant of violence’, which I interprete as a man’s need to defend his idea of himself against those who would attack that idea. A lot of male-on-male violence happens because someone is questioning a man about his ‘manhood’, so I drew blood-trails from the cuffs back to the rooster to the right-hand side of the page. The blood is only red when it’s on the cuffs, because the threat of violence only becomes real when you do violence in real life.
Hi all! A few months ago, I was asked to do a strip by ABC Radio National (Earshot) about my experiences working as a manga artist in Australia. It was part of a larger investigation into manga by ABC RN, and I was happy to do it.
You can listen to the radio program here at the ABC website, where it’s part of Earshot, which went live on Monday the 8th Oct 2018. I also did a short live radio segment on Stop Everything on Friday the 12th Oct 2018, which was lotsa fun.
The comic itself is available below, and it was so unexpectedly popular it got on the front page of the ABC website!
I got so pumped about it being on the front page of the ABC website, that I took a screenshot. It’s kind of vain, but it won’t last for long, so I might as well revel in it for a little while!
