Hi all! Christmas is coming up, and I just finished inking chapter 1 of Small Shen. There’s still chapter 2 to go, so hopefully I’ll be able to finish that by the end of this month. No Christmas holidays for me, but that’s the way it’s always been when I’m working on a book. So I’m used to it.
This week I’m showing something I did for my musician friend Yunyu. She’s been re-writing Christmas songs to suit her darkly subversive world views, and along with Zombie Christmas, this year it’s Were-Santa. The song takes the hot-button issues of this year, specifically werewolves and misbehaving Wall Street CEOs, and mixes the two together to create… something you can troll people with at the upcoming Christmas parties. Hey, I consider this song a happy song. And ofcourse, I created some appropriate album art for it.
You can also listen to the song and download it at SoundCloud.
Lyrics
It’s the crap-crappiest time of the year
My head’s jingle belling,
And hippies are telling me
“Be of good cheer”
It’s my most sorrowful time of the year
It’s the crap-crappiest season of all
When I become Santa,
and no I’m not mental
I just want a cure
from this crap-crappiest sickness of all
I was making a killing
In stock market trading
Cashing in on all the loopholes
I’m worse than Charles Ponzi
I took more than Madoff
But hey you’re not perfect yourself
It’s my most sorrowful time of the year
A were-santa he got me
he bit me that bastard
and now once a year
I’m transformed into this ponce with the bells
I’ll pay anything for a cure
for this sickness
and swap this for lycanthropy
And anything’s better than riding with sleigh bells
and giving my fortunes away.
It’s my most sorrowful time of the year
my pockets are echoing
my world is ending and
Don’t you dare cheer
It’s the most sorrowful time
It’s the most sorrowful time
Well, I’ve been crocheting a lot of cool amigurumi toys lately, which I’ll show in the next few weeks, but I also finished pencils for chapter 1 (of 9) of Small Shen, my collaboration with author Kylie Chan. This is a Chinese Fantasy story and is a prequel to her White Tiger series, and people who are familiar with what I like to draw best will probably know that I’m in my element here.
I’m sure you’re all wondering what Small Shen is about, so here are a few sample pages from chapter 1. Some are inked/toned and others are still in pencils, but you can probably get a good idea of how the art will turn out from these samples. Since Small Shen won’t be out (from Harper Collins) until Christmas 2012, I’ll probably show more later on next year.
NB. And yes, if you know your Chinese mythology, I can tell you that “Gold” and “Jade” are references to the demi-semi-gods “Golden Boy” and “Jade Girl”. The story’s written by Kylie though, so if you want to know more about how she uses these characters, I suggest you read White Tiger, which is the first actual book in the series.
Okay, I’m officially getting to work on the next book “Small Shen” (with Kylie Chan) in November, but I’ll hopefully be doing some work before October (where I head off to NYCC). I’ll talk more about that in a week’s time.
This week I recommend Mononoke. No, not Studio Ghibli’s Mononoke Hime. As worthy as that is of a recommendation, this is a completely different story, and a 12-episode TV series rather than a single movie. This series is obscure but highly underrated, and while it shares half of the more famous movie’s title, it’s simply titled Mononoke, nothing more.
Mononoke (2007 – Toei Animation) 12 Episodes + 1 Short Story
Mononoke is an unusual TV series, not least because of its visual look. It began life as the third tale in a series of short Japanese horror stories, called Ayakashi. The first tale was famous Japanese horror tale Yotsuya Kaidan (Strange Tale of Yotsuya), the second was Tenshu Monogatari (Tale of the Goddess), and the last was Bakeneko (Monster Cat). Bakeneko was the one which introduced the enigmatic main character of Mononoke, a nameless, wandering medicine-seller who appears to do sidelines in exorcisms. Being the most interesting of the three tales, both due to its story and its art direction, audiences quickly demanded a new TV series based on the medicine-seller, and that was Mononoke.
Plot
“Mononoke” is a term for Japanese demons, and unlike conventional demons, the Mononoke in this series are often supernatural phenomenon created by people who died in unhappy circumstances, or who otherwise have grievances. The creatures take physical form, and is fully capable of doing real harm.
Enter the mysterious albino-elf character with face-paint and a snazzy fashion sense. This nameless, wandering merchant claims to sell medicine, but it’s really a cover for exorcisms he performs on the Mononoke he encounters in each episode. Despite having an impressive demon-busting form and an exorcism sword, the power of the medicine-seller is very limited. Since Mononoke usually have some kind of human origin (often psychological), it’s impossible to exorcise them until you discover the source of the phenomenon, and the reasons for their manifestation. For the medicine-seller, this involves finding the Katachi (shape), the Makoto (truth), and the Kotowari (reason) of the Mononoke.
Unlike conventional demon-busting shows (which tend to be action-oriented), this show is like a detective story with psychological puzzles at its core, all viewed through a Japanese supernatural lens.
Why I Recommend this Story Mononoke is a gem. In both writing and art direction. Even if you’ve only seen a few screen caps of the series, you will probably already notice the bold, experimental style. The series looks like someone crossed traditional Japanese art with psychedelic art, adding a dash of Art Nouveau, Gustav Klimt, and surrealism along the way. I probably haven’t listed the wide range of art styles that this series sampled from, to create its unique look. Either way, it was a dream to look at, and its difference to the “conventional” anime look should be celebrated. For once, the experiment not only didn’t fail, but was a dramatic success.
All the more reason to marvel at the way this artistic style came to be. From what I can tell, the original series Ayakashi was a low-budget thing, and no one really had high expectations of Bakeneko, especially since top-billing went to Yotsuya Kaidan (famed illustrator Yoshitaka Amano was working on the character designs for that). I’m guessing the animators on Bakeneko thought, whatever, we can try something new with this since no one cares. Instead, Yotsuya Kaidan was a dull disappointment, and none of the lovely character designs by Amano translated well into anime. Conversely, Bakeneko was the triumph, and it was way more interesting to watch and look at than the other two stories.
The stories were also complex and engaging. You won’t expect a demon-busting story to be so cerebral and psychological, but these are – and many are also intensely internal. In every episode, there’s a number of other characters involved apart from the medicine-seller, and discovering their labyrinth psychological turmoil is part of the series – and the medicine-seller’s – job. Mind you, this is a horror series after all, and some of the stories get pretty grotesque in plumbing the depths of the human condition. The art can sometimes reflect the ugliness of the situation, but it’s never exploitative or truly disgusting. The writing also has a literary quality to it – by that, I mean it seems free of a lot of cliches and archetypes that an industry (in this case, the anime industry) often builds up over time. Like Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, I wonder if the writer comes from outside the anime/manga industry (in my mind, that is always a plus).
Perhaps the one “criticism” I have of Mononoke is the story-telling. It’s opaque, a tad jerky, filled with strange camera angles and is often straight-up trippy. But then, given the art-style and the subject matter, I shouldn’t have expected any other kind of story-telling that would have worked with the stories and the art. Mononoke is an unusual, strange take on a tired genre, and to use traditional methods of story-telling would have been a death-knell for the “feel” it was trying to evoke. It’s not, after all, a story for someone looking for something mainstream. No one I know had any trouble following the story, but its unapologetic weirdness will probably put off a lot of people who want something more… conventional. Average. Typical. If you want a more “normal” demon-busting story, stay the heck away from Mononoke – it’ll blow your mind in ways you’re not prepared for.
Lastly, the story is very, very heavily Japanese in origin, meaning that if you’re not familiar with some aspects of Edo-era Japanese culture, you may miss out on a few things. You don’t need much to understand the series, but someone with background knowledge will get more out of it. The story also ends at 12 episodes, which is a crying shame. In some ways I’m grateful that no one wants to run the series into the ground to milk more money, but I also wish more industry people will take notice of its artistic triumphs and act accordingly.
The last part of Odd Thomas 3 has finally been approved, and I can now work towards finishing the book! 40 pages left to ink before the end!
I realise I haven’t posted some art up for a while, so this week I’m posting up page 24 of “House of Odd”, the third Odd Thomas book. To give people an idea of how the art is adapted from the script, and the progression of the art from pencils to the final pages, I’ve put it here in stages.
The first stage is ofcourse the script, which in this case is written by someone else (with me acting as the illustrator only). This may be a good example of how to write a script.
PAGE 24
PANEL 1: Having turned away, Nedra walks into the house. Odd and Stormy follow behind her
STORMY: So, Ms. Nolan . . . Ozzie said you think this house is haunted?
NEDRA: These spirits are as spoiled rotten as any movie star.
PANEL 2: Reverse angle from the last panel, so we can see the characters walking towards the camera. In the background, behind them, the front door is now shut.
NEDRA: They think it’s all about them, them, them.
PANEL 3: Odd cocks his head to one side, eyes rolling a bit in frustration and bemusement. Nedra is blissfully unaware of this as she continues to lead them deeper into the mansion.
NEDRA: But it’s really my production.
NEDRA: I told Ozzie that I had no need for amateur ghostbusters like you.
PANEL 4: Stormy’s gaze narrows.
STORMY: Amateurs?
NEDRA: No offense. I’ve called in the professionals!
Next up, are the pencils. You may have noticed that I didn’t follow what was laid out in the panels in the script. This is because I feel that an illustrator’s job in comics is to tell the story as best as it can be told, and if that means not following the script, then so be it.
This isn’t uncommon in comics, since a fair number of artists will have been in situations when they can’t follow a script – mostly because what is described in the panels can’t be depicted in pictorial form. If it happens, it’s not because writers aren’t respected, but because writers aren’t always visual people, and don’t always know if what they’re describing in a panel can actually be drawn.
The inks are next. This part is straight-forward. I use a combination of dip pens (The Zebra G-pen and nikko pen) and Sakura microns to do my inking, and it’s worked for me fine. I find that the look of the art changes depending on the tools you use, but for Odd Thomas, I’ve always stuck with this style of art. Different kinds of stories call for different kinds of art, and Odd Thomas requires art that isn’t stylised or takes artistic lliberties. It’s not that kind of story.
Finally, the tones and dialogue. The tones are done by the wonderful Dee DuPuy, and she uses a program called Deleter ComicWorks, which I then later open up in Photoshop to add the words. And thus, the page is finished and ready for print.
