A short comic in The MMM anthology

Back in May 2022, **I answered an open call to a comic anthology pitch** by local illustrator Alan Bay. The project then had a successful kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in November.

And here it is! The ***Might, Magic & Monster-in-laws*** comic anthology with all its backer bonuses!

Might Magic & Monster-in-laws has 15 stories from creators around the world. For more information on the stories and their creators, check out the kickstarter page here.

In the meantime, here’s the pages with mine. The story is just 10 pages long and is called I want to meet your monster!

Met up with Alan a few days ago at Pink Ponk Comics to pick them up. The book is also on sale at the shop if you are interested in getting a copy.

I want to meet your monster!

(There are spoilers below so skip to the next section if you don’t want to read them.)

If someone were to ask me what I wanted to write about when I made this comic and if I didn’t try to pretty up my answer, it would just be: the relationship between two people and their fears. Sounds so grim and boring. That’s why I have fantastical beings and happenings in my work to pimp it up! Lol. Jokes aside, I do love fantasy and putting things together in a way I’ve not tried before. But I also did think a lot about relationships and fears.

Getting along with any individual is a learning process. No one can perfectly understand another person without effort! Even if we were to wear our innermost thoughts and emotions on our sleeves as the characters in the story have (in a way) with the existence of monsters - monsters being physicalized forms of their guardian’s lizard brains (ie our instinctual and hidden thoughts), things may not work out. In fact, they could get worse! Do you want to hear what your loved ones really think about you, even if they thought of them subconsciously? Would you rather know the truth to these thoughts, or a lie? (Be it a white lie or an unintentional lie.) What is okay or not okay for you to know? Thinking back to the title, what does meeting someone’s monster mean?

In the story, An’s fear prevents her from taking action but Jun’s fear pushes her to act with disregard for herself. The result is that although they should work as a team, they made conflicting decisions. If our emotions affect our decision making, should we bury them to make more rational choices? The aliens wanting to eliminate the monsters is a metaphorical nod to this idea. However, fearful An eventually defeated the aliens and found a way to harness her monster’s powers. A hint that perhaps by finally facing her monster, she was able to unleash her potential.

If you’ve read the comic, you’d have noticed that An and Jun are a same sex couple and they have a baby at the end. They needn’t be or do that and the story would still work. Why then did I draw what I drew?

Because that is my monster. It is something that is difficult to define or put into words. In every personal project I have done, I realise that it is there. It subtly pushes against norms especially if they seem unjust, and feels the need to rebel against being bound. At the same time that it wants this freedom, it abhors that it should force it’s ideals onto others or be seen as a heretic. This monster causes me to stop in my tracks. It causes me to be angry and sad. It even causes me to turn a blind eye. But it also slips out one way or another.

*****

I can only put up the final artwork of I want to meet your monster! a year after it is published. So, here’s the draft sketch instead. Some text and images have changed in the final work though. If you have a copy of the MMM anthology, thank you for purchasing it! If not, wait a year and you’ll at least get to see my story here.

The process

Because I needed to send in a script prior to drawing this comic, I did some research on how to write a comic manuscript and found Fred Van Lente’s comic script format. If you are interested to know how to write a comic script, templates for his script format can be downloaded at his website.

As usual, here’s the process for this project.