newsletter >> 11
:: message. October saw me speaking at both the Seoul Wow Book Festival and the Toronto International Festival of Authors. I’m very grateful to the coordinators of both events for hosting me, and I’m also quite glad to have gotten a chance to have spoken with Yeon-sik Hong (Umma’s Table and Uncomfortably, Happily) about the concept of home within our works.
I found Yeon-sik Hong’s approach to his work to be truly inspiring. His process led me to understand how one can free themselves through their creations, and open themselves up to discussing and processing their thoughts and lives. Sometimes I focus too much on the end goal of creating a drawing or a writing, and I think that sometimes it can be much better to let the process of writing and drawing help guide me towards other ideas and thoughts. Comics as a process of understanding the world around me, not necessarily about going from Point A to Point B and creating a product or good alone.
Thanks to Clara Lee and Connie Park of the Seoul Wow Book Festival, and many thanks to Miles Baker, Tatiana Doroslovac and Roland Gulliver of TIFA. I had a really wonderful time at both events, and hope to someday have an oppourtunity to do it again.
:: patreon. Speaking of goods and products, I’ve recently created a Patreon. The goal is to offset the costs of creating stories and to hopefully provide me with the funds to do more with the work. This includes capital for paying for the following:
- editors to help ensure that stories come out and are complete; that they are of quality, and are curated towards a theme
- assistants to help offload some labour
- printers to help make physical books and other products
...and that's just a few of the ideas. I've been wanting to do this for a while, and now I see that maybe there's no better time than the present.
Although it’s all in early stages, you can head over there and find my latest kids comic, Dinosaurs from Outer Space, available for reading. And if you’re looking for more mature works, you can find some comics under the Superzine folder. I’ll be updating that place on a regular basis, so be sure to sign up for free and receive notifications!
:: film. A lot of the film watching and reading I’ve been doing lately has had a pretty deep theoretical bent to it, especially with regards to psychoanalysis. Probably one of the more fascinating experiences has been watching both Vertigo and 2001 with Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz running through my head. Although I don’t feel as though Freud and Lacan are all entirely accurate in what they say, the ways in which Mulvey and Metz are able to illustrate their usage in film is pretty fascinating. Anyways, more about that perhaps another time.
That all being said, some films I’ve watched since the last ‘letter are The Running Man (1987), Midnight Run (1988), VI Warshowski (1991), Highlander (1986), Blood & Donuts (1995), Major League (1989), Young Frankenstein (1974), The Addams Family (1991), Curtains (1983), Cemetary Man (1994), The Neverending Story (1984), Spookies (1986), Demon Knight (1995), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), The Stepford Wives (1975), The Dead Zone (1983), Army of Darkness (1992), and Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990). (Those are all bluesky links, so if you’re on there, you’ll be able to see them. Otherwise…)
:: sports. The Blue Jays lost, but they were fantastic. I couldn’t be more proud of my hometown team for getting as far as they did.
:: drawing board.
:: books. I just recently finished Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, and it was pretty dystopic. Ishiguro’s exploration of what a neoliberal utopia might be like is pretty fascinating in describing the toll upon the rest of humanity. I’m not entirely sure that I’d call this story a “dystopia” as much as an “anti-utopia” though; it never feels as though there’s any way to effectively counter the ways in which society has been defined. As well, everyone’s apathy towards the system as well as their awareness of it indicates that it is simply a way of life and not worth fighting over, since the only energy they have left is to struggle to survive it.
I also found the use of Klara to be really fascinating, since what her function in the book seems to be is to take a horrible situation and make it palatable. In this sense, what we witness is Klara enabling this state of horror to exist for the reader, and in that way, solicit our acquiescence to it. A little grim, but I couldn’t imagine it to be anything else.
That’s it for this month. I’ll see you again in 30!
:: eric