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.
Small Shen: The book is out in bookstores, and here’s my post about it, which includes the book trailer and an extract of the first 50 pages! Hope everyone had a good New Year’s!
Zelda Fanfiction: Believe it or not, I have finished all 312 pages of my 11-chapter Zelda fanfiction, in the space of 7 months. Chapters 7-11 has yet to be toned, so I’ll be doing that in February, but it’s a startling improvement in speed compared to conventional manga/comics. Previously, I could only produce a 180-page book in 7 months in pure manga form, but I can double the output within the same period of time, while doubling the amount of story expressed with a prose/manga mix. If that 312 pages was in manga form (rather than a mix of manga and prose), I estimate the story would have taken at least 3 books (ie. 540 pages) to tell, and 3 years of actual work time.
I realise I haven’t posted chapter 3 on my blog yet, though I’m nearing the end of chapter 4. As of now, this series is being serialised on DeviantArt, MangaFox, SmackJeeves, Archive Of Our Own, and Tumblr. I’ll be posting chapter 4 up here shortly.
Here’s the story, as displayed completely in one Tumblr post. It’s also on this site, but Tumblr makes it easier to read, so I redirect people there.
Update:Small Shen is an ideal Xmas present, and #4 on the SciFi Charts! You can also read a 50-page extra from the book here! Click the “Download” button to download onto your computer, or you can download it zipped from here. We also created a book trailer for it! Check it out!
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Hi everyone! My next book Small Shen (from Harper Collins Voyager), will be out in Australian bookstores this month! I was super-excited when I got this book – the art was printed on high quality paper, and it just looks fabulous. As you can see from these pictures below, the book is a mix between prose and comics.
This is a collaboration with best-selling author Kylie Chan, and includes a free song (book soundtrack!) by my friend and long-time collaborator Yunyu, called Butterflies, that can be downloaded from a link at the back of the book.
The song ‘Butterflies’ by Yunyu will be delivered via QR tag, with instructions, at the back of the book.
I finally got around to posting my long-promised “Legend of Zelda” fanfiction onto Tumblr! Chapter 1 is 17 pages, and it’s done in a mix of prose and comics, much like “We are the Pickwicks”, except this story is much longer. Since it’s so long, I got my friend Yunyu to compose some music for it, which is fun. You can see her music track down below, in Youtube form, which is her version of “Zora Domain” backgroundmusic.
Now onto the actual story itself. I’ve posted all 17 pages onto a single post for Tumblr, so you can go directly to the Tumblr page itself to read the thing if you click on the first page. Not the best way to present a comic strip (on Tumblr… but it does make it easier to read/load, in terms of the internet. Enjoy!
Here’s the Table of Contents on Tumblr.This whole thing is also being posted on my DeviantArt, and also on SmackJeeves, so the most up-to-date chapters are being run there. Chapter 2 is running on SmackJeeves until the 10th November, when Chapter 3 begins.
Thoughts: It’s interesting how incredibly fast writing/drawing in this prose+comics format is. I started doing this in late May, and by September has already written the whole thing, all 300 pages of it. As of this post, I’ve drawn 160 of those 300 pages, and is mid-way through Chapter 6 (so at the half-way mark). I’ll talk about my work processes for this format later, but if you compare my standard work rate in pure comics format, it’s 10 months for 160 pages, not including toning. In this format, I’ve reached 160 pages in 5 months, so twice the content in half the time. It’s interesting when you think about it.
