Part 2 of my story “Beating the Loneliness Monster” is here, in Youkie Magazine‘s January 2023 issue! Its 4-parts in total, and the story is actually by my 11 year-old niece Kelly Tao (I helped a bit). Excited to see Parts 3&4 come out in the next 6 months!
“The Dreaming” is being republished in 2023 by IPI Comics, an imprint of Australian publisher IFGW Publishing! This story is a Lovecraftian take on the Australian classic “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, about twin sisters who attend a remote Australian boarding school where schoolgirls have been known to disappear.
The original story will have some minor rewrites/updates to suit a more modern audience, so it’ll have some new pages and redrawn art. There will also be a vol4, which will be a standalone story set in the same universe involving characters connected to some of the original characters, and hopefully the main storyline can continue in a part 2 after that.
Here is an interview with Soda and Telepaths about this, thanks to Anthony Pollock.
Here’s an interview with me from a while back, by Bettina Burger who is researching Australian Speculative Fiction. This interview was done before the rights to “The Dreaming” left the previous publisher, so what I say about “The Dreaming” will be different now that the circumstances are different.
I have an interview up with ALIA CYS Scoop, a newsletter for librarians. It’s on my work and also the Australia Comics & GN Database that I set up, and which is managed by ALIA librarians. Many thanks to Petrina for organising the interview and putting it up!
I have an interview with Jun Sugawara-san (and his translator Garrett Hudspeth) of Animator Supporters, who are a charity that supports underpaid animators struggling in the anime industry. Underpaying animators has been a long-time problem with the anime industry, to the extent where the industry could collapse, so here is Jun-san explaining why that happens.
This interview was conducted with a pre-prepared, bilingual Q&A document, so here is the full transcript with the original Japanese text. We didn’t cover the political aspect of underpaid Japanese animators, but that’s in the transcript. This interview was also hosted by the ACA, at their yearly Stanley Conference, many thanks to them.
Kookie Magazine recently changed its name to “Youkie“, but apart from that target audience which is now everyone aged 8-12, little has changed. In my fourth collaboration with Youkie, I did a 8-page story (to be released in 4-parts, one each quarterly issue) with my 11 year-old niece Kelly called “Beating the Loneliness Monster”.
Kelly supplied the story and the character designs, which is about how popular girl Jessica meets a boy called Tom in an online game called VR Quest. Initially impressed by Tom’s sense of humour, Jessica eventually meets him in real life, and is… disappointed. Kelly wrote this story due to her pre-teen understanding of how people’s online personas are often different to real life ones, and how to deal with that in person.
Check out the latest Oct2022 issue of Youkie magazine! This story will be released in 2-page increments for 4 issues of Youkie.
Kookie Magazine, a quarterly magazine for girls 8-12, has released my latest 6-page story “Song Beastling”, written by myself and musician Yunyu Ong. It’s a story about a musical girl being haunted by a mythical Chinese beast the DiJiang, which is an actual “monster” entry in the ancient Chinese text Classic of Mountains and Seas.
And yes, it actually looks like a headless 6-legged beast with four wings – I’m not kidding. One of the cuter entries in a list of strange-looking cryptids that people once believed exist, retooled for the modern age.
Check it out at the Kookie Magazine website!
