Comic Con and The story of “Fruit City”

Fruit City is one of the top 10 submissions selected for 2022 SG Comic Con’s WIP (work in progress) programme!

Attended this year’s Comic Con with Clarence and it was great. Met some new acquaintances in the comic circle, visited a few local creators’ booths and bought quite a few books. It is hard to believe that it was only about a year before that I first thought to try my hand at making comics!

COMIX.SG had also invited artists from their comic anthology to participate by putting together a poster of their works. Hence, I had a poster up too. The general atmosphere at SGCC was vibrant and energetic. I wished I had taken more pictures of the booths and activities that were happening there!

What’s fruit city and how did it come about?

After making the Collector’s Invite which has anthropomorphised animals, I thought how about anthropomorphising fruits?

The idea of a city with fruit attributes had been brewing in my head for awhile. One day I suddenly thought, “tropical fruits are fascinating!” They come in all shapes, sizes and colours and are super duper yummy. They are such great objects to draw. Look at their weird patterns and textures! (Think the durian, dragonfruit and snake fruit.) Some are just cute. (Like the mangosteen and star fruit.) I made a little zine with sketches of infrastructure, vehicles and food in fruit-y designs. It is a city enculturated by tropical fruits. When I was brooding over what to draw for the 24 hr comic day last October, I decided to turn the idea of a fruit city into a story.

At first I drew without much planning, there was no script. So, I pulled a few tarot cards to give me a general direction of the story. Heheh.
And this is what I drew for 24 hour comic day.

Eventually, I fleshed out the characters and slowly Fruit City became a story about migrant workers. Why not write something that I am familiar with? I used to volunteer with migrants and did community art workshops with them. So, a pool of lived-stories told to me by the migrants themselves were already gathered in my head. Also, at the time of brainstorming, Jia asked me to attend an event where Stephii was giving a talk. It was about migrant workers and transport in Singapore. I think that event was what gave me the idea of a migrant themed story. In this comic, tropical fruits are local residents and vegetables are foreigners. Our protagonist is a romanesco broccoli visiting his friend, a mangosteen in Fruit city. Of course, there is more to this visit than we think.

So, Fruit City became this and I submitted it to Comic Con WIP. I had planned for one more page but didn’t get to draw it in time. (Click on the images for a closer look.)

Will I continue Fruit City? Maybe. I hope to, but I don’t know when I will get to you. However ideas for the next few pages are already swimming around in my head. :D

And here are my work processes for Fruit City. Once again, I like to place them here to remind myself of the steps I took.