These are stories I’ve written/drawn since 1998. Some are available online only, some are both online and part of a printed collection that you can buy, though some are part of magazines or print collections that are not available to read on this site.
2023
Beating the Loneliness Monster
In my fourth collaboration with Kookie Magazine (after it went through a rebrand and is now called “Youkie“), I ended up co-writing and illustrating a 4-part story called “Beating the Loneliness Monster” with my 11 year-old niece Kelly! Kelly supplied the story, which is aimed at both boys and girls aged 8-12, and 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.
This is an 8-page story published in 4-parts, which means that it will be published over the course of a whole year in Youkie. Kelly supplied the character designs too.
2022
Song Beastling
My third collaboration with Kookie Magazine Jun2022 saw my co-writing and illustrating “Song Beastling“, which was a semi-true story that comes from my good musician friend Yunyu Ong. Aimed at girls 8-12, it’s a story about a musical girl haunted by a mythical Chinese beast called the DiJiang, which is a real mythical beast listed in ancient classic text Classic of Mountains and Seas.
Talgard: Tome 2
Talgard is an on-going series published by Gestalt, and about the adventures of Talgard the sell-sword, whose brain is a greater weapon than his brawn, and who has a wit as sharp as his blade. Both volumes are a collection of short comic stories written by Gary Proudley, and each illustrated by an emerging or established Australian comics storyteller.
I illustrated a four-page short story for volume 2, where I got to draw a lot of people rowing a lot of boats in the middle of the sea. It was challenging as boats, oceans and tonnes of rowers are a lot of work to draw, but I quite liked the story and how it turned out.
Buy it here from Gestalt’s online store.
FOLIO: Manga Fandom in Australia
This is a comics-prose essay I wrote about the under-discussed manga fandom in Australia, and which was written for a government-funded Australian Comics academic project called FOLIO. This is spearheaded a group of Comics Studies academics at University of Melbourne, RMIT & UTS, and is a multi-year project that aims to chart the contemporary Australian comics scene. Check out the FOLIO website for more news!
Click here to read it on the FOLIO website.
2021
One In, All In
For my third collaboration with Kookie Magazine Sep2021, I’m illustrating a story called “One In, All In“, which was written by aboriginal writer Gayle Kennedy. It’s my third collaboration with Kookie, and aimed at girls 9-12. It’s a story about three aboriginal girls, one of whom, Rosie, was born with spina bifida. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that Rosie and her cousins Lily and Daisy find that sometimes, you just have to fight for respect and for your rights.
| 2020 |
Mirrors
Here’s another a 6-page story I did for Kookie Magazine, called “Mirrors“. It’s my second collaboration with Kookie, and aimed at girls 9-12. It’s a story about finding confidence in yourself, so you can be ready to face the world as a teenager.
#AustraliaBurns Anthology
Due to the devastating bushfires in late 2019/early 2020 in Australia, which was one of the worst in recorded history, comic book writers and artists in Australia banded together to create a charity comic anthology. I contributed a 4-page story about Australian animals to this called “Friend or Fiend: the Story of Ember“, which was written by Steve Carter and Antoinette Rydyr (SCAR).
Buy it here and contribute to the fund-raising effort.
| 2019 |
The Heartsmith
This was a 6-page story I did for Kookie Magazine #6, called “The Heartsmith“. It’s aimed at girls 9-12, and is a story about heartbreak, healing and different generations of women helping each other.
Click here to read it in full.
| 2018 |
The story of Queenie Chan, a manga artist crushing sexism and stereotypes
This was commissioned by the ABC Radio National (Australia) in 2018. It’s about my experiences drawing manga-style comics in Australia, starting from my exposure to manga as a child living overseas. It was my first time doing something so personal, and later on, I got a number of messages suggesting that people quite resonated with the theme of loneliness in the strip.
This strip is has also used for an English textbook in Queensland as part of the state’s education curriculum.
| 2013 |
The Legend of Zelda: The Edge and The Light
*Note: The above link goes to fanfic site “Archive of Our Own”. The series page on this website is here.
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Fanfiction (312 pages – Mix of Comics and Prose)
Buy: You can read this online for free in its entirety. Please visit the Store page to buy.
After years of absence, Link finally returns to Hyrule from his travels abroard. Initially expecting to greet Princess Zelda, he instead finds the kingdom in decline, plagued by all kinds of trouble. Just what is causing these problems, and does it have anything to do with why Link left in the first place?
| 2012 |
We Are the Pickwicks
Genre: Drama, Mystery (10 pages – comics-prose)
Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy.
Have you ever wondered about the neighbour of Wendy Darling and her brothers? While Wendy got to go to Neverland with Peter Pan, what did her neighbour do?
This was written for a “Peter Pan” anthology BentoComics.com put out in April 2012, much like the “Sherlock Holmes” anthology. This story, however, is different, since it’s a combination of prose + comics rather than straight-out comics. I call it “comics-prose”, and it was interesting to write and do, and there’s very good reasons why I went this route, which I’ll probably take from now on. I explained my reasons here on this page.
| 2011 |
| 2011 | |
 Sister Holmes: The Nun in the Bar
Genre: Mystery, 16 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy. Story: A nun walks into a bar, and encounters a man who has been robbed and based unconscious. Who is the perpetrator? Notes: This is a short story for the “Sherlock Holmes” anthology BentoComics.com put out for April, consisting of a bunch of short stories involving Sherlock Holmes by the contributor. When I was first asked to do a Sherlock Holmes story, I couldn’t be less interested. Mystery was one of my least-favourite genres – until I re-read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and realised that I just never appreciated Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing as a child. Endeavoring to write my own Mystery story, I settled on… a Detective Nun. |
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| 2010 | |
 Elevator
Genre: Horror, 14 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy. Story: A fireman talks about something he encountered one night, something involving an elevator… Notes: This is a short story I started in 2010, but just couldn’t muster the energy or motivation to finish until 2010. Things like this can happen sometimes, and it’s real difficult to re-ignite that interest once you’ve lost it. I decided to put my foot down and finish it in 2010 because BentoComics is putting out a Halloween anthology for October 2010, and I wanted to “clear the air”, so to speak. |
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| 2009 | |
 Shoes
Genre: Horror, 6 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy. Story: A young man, walking backstage at the Chinese Opera, encounters a single shoe in his path… Notes: This was a short story I did for an anthology called “Journeys”, which was a collection of short stories from Western manga artists. It was for a trip to Japan’s Comitia, a giant convention where amateur manga artists/illustrators sold their work. I really like this story – short and spooky. |
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| 2008 | |
 Forget-Me-Not
Genre: Chinese Fantasy, 33 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy. Story: A Scent Merchant arrives at the devastated country of Wei, and confronts the king for his lack of leadership. The king, however, has been long consumed by the search for a particular fragrance he encountered years ago… Notes: This is a short story I wrote for Yen Plus magazine (published by Yen Press), and it was printed in the July 2009 issue. I had to wait a while before I felt okay with putting it online and letting everyone see it – since now that Yen Plus has gone fully digital, there’s very little chance of people ever getting to see this story in its original form. |
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 Sleeping Chick
Genre: Cute Animals, 14 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”, and is also available as a stand-alone mini-comic via the Store. Please visit the Store page to buy in each format. Story: Zzzzzz…. *wakes up* *looks around* Notes: Here’s something I came up with while allegedly attentive at a publishing convention. I had a notepad with me while I was listening to some of the greatest minds in fantasy fiction talk, and all I could think of was chickens. It’s cute, short and sweet. |
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 Portrait of a Sociopath
Genre: Horror, 2 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy. Story: A sociopath – in his own words Notes: This was done at the same time as 2 one-page stories, but the subject matter is a lot more serious. I didn’t release this story for a long time because of its subject matter – it’s based on a horrific true event and features the culprit. In the end, I wrote 2 more pages of text after the 2 pages to explain the problems I had in releasing this story. |
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 One-Page Stories
Genre: Done for Fun, 1-page stories Story: Science-Fiction for Telepaths, and World’s Shortest Horror Story. Notes: These two are short 1-page stories I “drew” as a fun aside. They’re “pixel art”, meaning that the art style used is purely pixel arrangements, not pencil-on-paper style of drawing. I did it to experiment and it was fun for a while – it’ll be interesting to see if I can draw a longer story using this “art style”. Anyway, the “Science-Fiction for Telepaths” story is explained here in this blog entry, while the “World’s Shortest Horror Story” is an adaptation of the first 2 lines of Fredric Brown’s story “Knock”, published in 1948 in “Thrilling Wonder Stories”. Basically “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” |
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| 2007 | |
 Legend of Zelda: Princess Zelda
Genre: Fantasy, 8 pages Story: Princess Zelda, titular character of the Legend of Zelda Nintendo gaming series, reflects on the skies over Hyrule. Notes: A short story I did for LifeMeter Comics 2, an anthology of short stories about video-game related characters. It was good fun to write a story about Princess Zelda – as a huge Zelda fan, it’s nice to see it from Zelda’s perspective. The art is also quite beautiful, especially the cover page. Also, while the story says “8 pages”, it’s actually 8 half-pages. So it’s 4 pages. |
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| 2006 | |
 Message To You
Genre: Romance, 4 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy. Story: A balloon carries a message – Will you be my valentine? Notes: This story is super-cute and I like it heaps. It’s got a great concept, and despite being only 4 pages, managed to tell the story really well. |
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 The Two-Dollar Deal
Genre: Romance, 8 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy. Story: Boy Meets Girl at a tacky two-dollar store. Is there any hope for romance? Notes: This was done way back when I decided to try using brush pens. That was a massive failure, but the story itself was pretty good. It was inspired by a friend who used to work at a 2-dollar store (and would bring these ugly yellow rubber chickens to work), and the 8-page story was structured so it would fit the Hagio Moto declaration “If you can do a complete story in 8-pages, you can write a story in any length”. Proved! it was also done for a “Generations” anthology collection, if I remember right. |
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 Only Flora
Genre: Cute Animals, 5 pages Story: Every morning, a young woman walks past an old beggar woman and her dog, and hears their story… Notes: Don’t quite remember why I did this – I think it was to experiment with a particular style of cross-hatching? Either way, it’s not very good – I have a re-working of it I need to draw. |
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| 2005 | |
 Ten Years Ago Today
Genre: Horror, 10 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy. Story: It was a dark, stormy night when the phone rang… Notes: This was done for a Wirepop anthology, back when I as serialising a horror story called “Block 6” there. We had a choice of doing something based either on our serialised stories, or something totally original. I opted for original. |
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| 2004 | |
 Yuen
Genre: Chinese Fantasy, 30 pages Story: A boy goes to the Nezha temple at night to pray for his mother’s recovery from an illness. Any luck? Notes: Drawn for a Japanese competition (Manga Academy, I believe), so this reads from right-to-left. It was really just an excuse to draw a Chinese fantasy story using one of my favourite characters from Chinese mythology. I was also testing some kind of colour+b/w art style… which in my opinion didn’t work out at all. But, I will TOTALLY draw more Chinese fantasy someday. And I’ll get it right next time. |
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 TwinSide
Genre: High School Romance, 14 pages and Dead Story: A pair of twin sisters attend a high school, where one of them has a crush on someone… Notes: This was done for a TOKYOPOP pitch that got rejected, and it was a good thing too. This pair of twin sisters would eventually go on to become the unhappy twins in the 3-volume horror story “The Dreaming”… and it’s peculiar to see them in their earlier incarnations as high school dramedy bit-extras. And this isn’t even the first incarnation of these two!! These are the ONLY two characters I’ve created who has jumped “story”. It’s not something to be encouraged. |
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| 2003 | |
 A Girl Called Marian
Genre: Western, 16 pages Story: A young man is wanted Dead or Alive for Murder, and Marion is the reason why… Notes: A story done for the same Japanese competition as “Yuen”, so that’s why it reads from right-to-left. This one won a high-recommended, and I can see why… it’s quite a good story, told well, and was originally meant to be a prelude to a longer story. The unfortunate thing about these kinds of “preludes” is that the longer stories often end up not getting drawn because of their length… but you never know. |
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 Greenhouse
Genre: Romance, 10 pages Story: A short silent story, about a girl who walks her dog past a greenhouse every day Notes: Not a very good story – this was done for the “Generation” anthology in 2003 and I was rushed to come up with something good. Or just rushed, because I didn’t come up with anything good. As every creator knows, when you’re mediocre, you’re just mediocre. |
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 Keeper of the Soul
Genre: Fantasy, 13 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy. Story: A little girl sits with her family inside their fortress, when a loud knock is heard through the door… Notes: This story still has top-quality background art, despite being drawn back when I couldn’t hold a pen properly. It’s amusing – I look at my older art, and see that I was long established at drawing backgrounds years before I figured out how to draw people properly. Either way, this was a prelude to a longer story that will never get done due to its length, and it’s more of a “mood” piece. As a mood piece, it excels. |
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 A Chinese Ghost Story (New)
Genre: Chinese Fantasy, 16 pages and Dead Story: A travelling scholar meets a beautiful young woman, who turns out to be a ghost under the control of an evil monster. Notes: This is an adaptation of an old Chinese ghost story from an anthology called Liu Tsai, and is a more updated version of the same story I did in 2000. This was specifically for a TOKYOPOP submission that got (thankfully) rejected, so it’s now dead in the water. In retrospect, I’m grateful. |
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| 2002 | |
 Twins
Genre: Comedy, 30 pages Story: A pair of twin sisters attempt to diet to squeeze into a lovely dress… Notes: What the heck possessed me to write a story about dieting?! Ah, the inexplicable things you do when you’re young. I think I drew this for some kind of Taiwanese manga competition in a girl’s magazine, which explains why the original art for this no longer exists. I committed the cardinal mistake of sending my originals in to a competition. Dumb. Either way, this stars the very first incarnation of the twin sisters from “The Dreaming”… as kinda goofy. |
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 Air+Space
Genre: Comedy, 50 pages Story: Two pilots duel in the skies for the affections of a girl called Sierra. Notes: This story finally explained to me why I should never, EVER do comedy. The original story was written in 1999 I believe, and the years haven’t been kind to it. It was just really awkward. I guess comedy just isn’t my thing. |
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| 2001 | |
 A Short Ghost Story
Genre: Horror, 31 pages Buy: This is part of “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010”. Please visit the Store page to buy. Story: A group of girls and an isolated toilet block. Who knows what might have happened in there before? Notes: The first ghost story I’ve ever drew, and it seems to have aged quite well, despite questionable art. The style is very “stark” (I suppose I was going through an experimental phase), so it’s nice to see it turn out so well and still stand on its own despite me being able to draw much better now. I wonder if I should do something similar again. Something minimalistic like this, that is… |
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 A Chinese Ghost Story (Old)
Genre: Chinese Fantasy, 48 pages and Dead Story: A travelling scholar meets a beautiful young woman, who turns out to be a ghost under the control of an evil monster. Notes: The older version of the 2003 Chinese Ghost Story, albeit with crappier art. I think I stopped drawing this story when I realised my art just wasn’t up to par. I spent years in some kind of artistic limbo, churning out drawings of people that could really have used an anatomy class (though the backgrounds were pretty good). I wish I ad enrolled in some kind of art course. But then, I was still studying for my programming degree back then, and thinking I was going to be a programmer. So that’s why I didn’t take up an art course. Life can be unexpected at times. |
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| 1998 | |
 Shirley’s Story
Genre: Psychological Drama, 64 pages Story: A young girl’s best friend commits suicide by jumping in front of a train, and she begins to hear train noises every night… Notes: The first manga I ever drew, and the first original story I ever wrote. Normally, this sort of thing is kept away from public eyes because it’s bound to be embarrassing, and this is definitely embarrassing. But I guess we all have to start somewhere. There’s really not much to say about this except that everyone thinks they’re really deep when they’re 18. |
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This is a fanfiction I started writing in 2006, based on the “Legend of Zelda” series by Nintendo. At the time, I was unable to finish it because of other professional commitments, but I decided to come back and finish this from May 2012 to February 2013. I changed its format to “illustrated prose”, since it’s impossible to do the full story using a comics format – and I also wanted to test how long it’ll take for me to write and draw a 300 page book. Turns out, no longer than a 160 page manga. I worked to tight deadlines, and things turned out pretty well! I made an information pages about the series here.