Tag: funny

Yunyu: The Christmas Chain Saw Massacre

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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.

To get your FREE copy of the song Were-Santa, join Yunyu’s Mailing List and it will be sent to you!

You can also listen to the song and download it at SoundCloud.

 

Crapmas by Yunyu
 

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

It’s the most sorrowful time of the year

Sister Holmes: Dectective Nun

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Hi all, I’m mid-way through inking Odd Thomas 3 (while watching Colbert Nation and making squiggly lines from laughing while inking), and there’s an interview with me up on the Graphic Novel Reporter, by Danica Davidson. Thanks, Danica and GNR.

Today, good news if you’re attending Sakura Con 2011 in Seattle this weekend. The BentoComics people have a table there and at least two anthologies for sale, the first a collection of Sherlock Holmes related stories by many of BentoComics’ contributing artists, including myself.

Update: So popular was this anthology that it sold out completely at Sakura Con on Day 1!

I contributed a 16-page story in the manner of a Sherlock Holmes story, except that it’s about Sister Holmes, Detective Nun. Because I looked it up online, and the only badass nun we had in comics was Warrior Nun Areala, so obviously what we needed was a cool, logical nun who solves baffling mysteries with rational deduction. If you see this anthology at Sakura Con, may the Power of Christ compel you to buy it (and also the second anthology, which I outline below).

 

Anthology cover for Sherlocke Holmes

 

Above is the cover (drawn by Myung), and you can read the Sister Holmes story by clicking the cover page below.

 

Sister Holmes: Detective Nun
Click to read on Bentocomics.com!

 

I’m not sure what it was about the “Write a Sherlock Holmes Story” request, that made me want to re-write Sherlock Holmes as a nun. It may be because of all the “re-imaginings” of Sherlock Holmes lately. You have Movie Sherlock, which “re-imagines” Sherlock as a man of action. You have Young Sherlock Holmes, Modern-Day Sherlock Holmes, and Steampunk Sherlock Holmes… all of which amounts to something like a change of scenery. If they’re re-imagining Sherlock Holmes, they’re not re-imagining him enough.

Apart than that, there’s also the wonderful original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, who I recently re-read with fresh eyes and new appreciation. The first thing that struck me about the Holmes stories is how perfect they are. They are all fairly different, yet formulaic enough for people to be entertained, but not alienated. They are the reason why Sherlock Holmes is one of the most widely recognised literary archetypes in the world, and continues to be. What can I add to something so perfect, so archetypal?

So I subverted it. That’s the only way I felt I could put an interesting spin on it – the stories all have to be good mystery stories, but the bit players are up for some fun. So Sister Holmes is female and a nun, and Father Watson, while not in this story, is extremely impressed by her powers of observation and deduction. The two live in a small chapel in 221 Baker St, two doors down from the Ye Olde London Secret Sisterhood of Cake Decorators. She is no joke, folks.

 
 

Queenie Chan Anthology – 2000-2010: Then there’s also this anthology for sale at the Bento table, which is a 150-page book containing a collection of my 10 best short stories drawn over the past decade, 9 of which are available to read on my website. Readers and fans have asked me for a long time where they can buy a collection of my short stories, and now you can, in book form.

 

Queenie Chan Short Stories - 2000-2010
Click to Buy this on Lulu.com!

 

It’s a print-on-demand book, so you can go to this page at Lulu to order a copy, if you can’t make it to Sakura Con. I’ll do a more detailed post on this on a later date, but for now, I’ll just mention that it’s there and available.

 

Bentocomics.com – Meet Mimi Sashimi

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I just came back from a holiday on the Silk Road, spending 10 days traipsing around China with a Hong Kong tour, hitting all the predictable places and having a blast. We went from Urumqi to Turpan, to Hamu, then Dunhuang, from them onto Xian, Luoyang and the Shaolin temple. Sure, the last two isn’t really part of the Silk Road, But I must mention that Xian is a fantastic city and worth going to again sans-tour next time.

Now that I’ve been back for a few days and is rested enough, I bring you something fun and interesting: how we came up with the Bento Mascot for Bento Comics.

 

Introducting the Bento Mascot: I bring you all the mascots we designed before we decided on the official Bento Mascot, Mimi Sashimi. It was meant to be like a design contest – all the participants in Bento came up with their (mostly) food-related designs, and we collectively chose which one we thought was the cutest. Or the most suitable. Or the most clever. As far as these contests go, the criteria is never stable. It’s just a matter of what catches our eye. Which makes you wonder – what makes a good mascot?

Here’s the runner ups, by:

 

Dan's Mascot

Dan – A bunch of taco octopuses from outer space

 

Svetlana's mascot

Svetlana – It’s a happily crumpled piece of paper

 

Myung's mascot

Myung – Food and the one about to eat it

 

And the winning entry, mine:

 

Queenie - Mascot

The whole sushi family

 

I’m not sure what it was about my entry that people seemed to like, despite me initially being too embarrassed to show it. After giggling at everyone else’s mascot designs, it seemed that everyone unanimously liked mine the best.

Perhaps it’s the contrast between the 3 different sushi people – I often find that drawing a few versions of a “tribe” and putting them next to each other can often give personality to what is essentially a bunch of line drawings. It’s human nature to ascribe personalities to a “group” of things, no matter how non-human they look. Observe people pointing at a bunch of clouds and seeing giraffes, elephants and Persian cats. What gives? Looking at the three sushi people, who do you think is the out-going one?

We decided pretty quickly – Mimi Sashimi is our new mascot. We (Svetlana and Dan, mostly) tweaked her design a bit, to make her cuter, rounder, and more edible. Look out for more members of the sushi family later on!

Mimi Sashimi

BentoComics.com – The Two-Dollar Deal

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Wahaay! Two more stories until I end my weekly run of uploading comics to Bento Comics, and this week is a 2006 romance story I did for “Generation” anthology, only 8 pages long. It’s been up on this LJ before, but here it is once again for those who missed it the first time around.

Rundown: Bento Comics is a new website that permits users to read and compile their own short story anthologies. It then prints the book at a printing company called Lulu, and delivers the personalised book to your door. A new publishing model, if you will.

Short Story of the Week: Romance in a tacky two-dollar store. Can it happen?

E-book: Available on the right-hand side of this page, where it says “Ebook Available in .epub!”. It’s DRM-free, and Epub can be read on all platforms EXCEPT the Kindle. I’d like to charge USD$0.99 for this story (like iTunes), but the system isn’t yet in place so you can download it for free.

If you don’t have an e-reader like the iPad or Nook, you an download e-readers for your PC – here’s 2 programs you can download: The Adobe Acrobat eReader, and the Barnes and Noble eReader.

 

The Two Dollar Deal

Click here to read on Bentocomics.com!

 

I wrote this story after discovering that a co-worker at a video-game company I worked at also worked part-time at a two-dollar store. It was quite surprising – she used to bring these tacky yellow rubber chickens to work as a gag, and I used to wonder where she got so many of them. But then I knew. Thinking of all that junk in a two-dollar store prompted me to write this story, which is still one of my favourites.