Interview with Chris Riddell (SWF 2019)

Chris Riddell is in town this weekend for SWF. The UK Children’s Laureate is promoted as a major illustrator of children’s books by the festival, and rightly so as Riddell’s books like The Edge’s Chronicles, Gulliver’s Travels, Ottoline and Goth Girl are well loved. For comics fans, Riddell is also the illustrator for several of Neil Gaiman’s books such as The Graveyard Book, Fortunately, the Milk… and The Sleeper and the Spindle. Their latest collaboration is Art Matters, which came out last year. But I am more interested in the fact that Riddell is the political cartoonist for The Observer newspapers. I still think political cartoon is a powerful medium today.

Riddell took time out from his busy schedule to answer some questions of mine.


Many outside the UK are familiar with your work as a children books' writer and illustrator, especially with your drawings for The Graveyard Book and other stories written by Neil Gaiman. How do they react when they find out you are a political cartoonist too for The Observer?

Many people are surprised when I tell them that I’m the political cartoonist for The Observer but they recognise my style which isn’t significantly different from my illustration work. Lately I’ve been drawing Brexit unicorns, Chinese dragons and Tory trolls.

You have said that you did not find that much a difference in the tools you utilized when drawing a children book or skewing Theresa May or Trump. How do you feel about Brexit, Boris and the state of British politics now?

The only thing I can say about the state of politics right now is that it is a great time to be a political cartoonist!

You are optimistic about the state of political cartooning in the world today, given the affordances of technology and the antics of sometimes-too-exciting world leaders like Trump. But what's good material for political cartooning can be bad for humanity. Can political cartoons change the world?

I don't believe political cartoons change the world but they can help to articulate people’s thoughts and change the political mood sometimes. People change the world.

Political and social satire was not confined to the editorial pages in the past. One of my favorite books is The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman by Raymond Briggs. We have less of that these days. Would you want to do combine the two one day? (political satire and children books)

I would love to combine political satire and children’s books and my subject would be climate change – my medium, the graphic novel.

As you can probably tell, I'm a big fan of Raymond Briggs too. Are you excited about his new book?

Raymond Briggs has been a huge influence on me. He was my personal tutor at art school and we have kept in touch ever since. ‘Ethel and Earnest’ is Raymond’s masterpiece but I’m looking forward to his new book.



Drawing political cartoons can be dangerous - Charlie Hebdo and closer to Singapore, the various lawsuits against Malaysian cartoonist, Zunar and Singapore cartoonist, Leslie Chew. Did you have any close encounters yourself?

My encounters are on social media and I can choose what to look at and take onboard. Trolls are easy to spot.

Some have confused satire with fake news. Is it a thin line?

Satire doesn’t hide under bridges, fake news trolls do.

Is gif the future for political cartooning and satire?

Gif is one tool. There are many. I post a ‘visual diary’ drawing on social media every day and film myself drawing live. I’m also interested in podcasting.

I am a school teacher. You have talked about the need for creativity in the British education system and the importance of the school libraries. If you are the Education Minister for a day, which policy would you change or introduce?

If I were the Education Minister for a day, I would make it a statutory requirement that all schools have a library and a qualified librarian to run it.

Neil Gaiman visited Singapore twice (once for SWF) and is hugely popular. Readers would want me to ask: how was it like working with Neil?

Working with Neil is like a fairy tale – often literally. He sends me magical words and then allows me to imagine them visually with complete freedom.

I think of Neil as ‘the wise wizard’ and myself as his rotund hobbit companion.


Gaiman and Riddell’s love for libraries.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2018/sep/06/neil-gaiman-and-chris-riddell-on-why-we-need-libraries-an-essay-in-pictures

You can find out about Riddell’s SWF appearances here:

https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/nacswf/nacswf/author-speaker/Chris-Riddell.html


Thanks to Catherine Alport for her help!

Forgive but not forget: Interview with Rani Pramesti (SWF 2019)

The politics of remembrance and commemoration is complex. One can forgive but one should not forget. In places like South Africa, East Timor and Aceh, truth and reconciliation commissions have been set up to investigate and reveal the atrocities committed by the colonizers, the complicit and the compliant. It is not just a tabling of reports and mere presentation of facts and figures, but it is important how narratives are shaped and shared. It is through storytelling that ideas are spread and kept alive.

This is where comics is a powerful medium for such a purpose – giving voice to the silenced and speaking truth to power. In 2012, a young woman was raped on a bus in Delhi, India. She died from her injuries a few days later. A comic book based by the tragic incident was produced in 2014. Priya’s Shakti makes use of augmented reality tech and is available for online reading.

https://professorlatinx.osu.edu/comics/priyas-shakti/

Closer to home, the events of the May 1998 riots in Indonesia have inspired comic artists like Mice to reflect on the aftermath of the riots on the ordinary citizens in Jakarta. Now, adding to the list is Rani P Collaborations’ Chinese Whispers, a digital comic that has its first incarnation as a performance installation in 2014. It traces lead artist, Rani Pramesti's journey from Indonesia to Australia, from citizen to diaspora.

Growing up in a privileged Chinese family in Indonesia, Rani was sent off to live in Australia when the riots happened. Her story is not uncommon. I have colleagues from Indonesia who came to study and live in Singapore after 1998 for the same reason. Some came to Singapore. Others like Rani went to Australia and she grew up safely in the comfort offered by her adopted country. But she wondered about her past, which formed the basis of her art practice. Having graduated from the University of Melbourne in 2013 with a Bachelor of Dramatic Art, Rani formed Rani P Collaborations to work on productions which explore history, memories and trauma. She mined her own family history for the world to see and reflect. In Sedih//Sunno, she shared her mom’s story as a sexually abused child. In Surat-Surat (Letters), she used her grandparents’ letters to each other to tell a love story.

For her appearance at the Singapore Writers Festival in November, she returns to her first performance installation, Chinese Whispers, whose lifespan as a performance piece has been extended to a new platform of digital comics. For Chinese Whispers, Rani collaborated with illustrator, Cindy Saja; composer, Ria Soemardjo; and web developers, Martin Harusetyanto and Gondo, to develop this new version of Chinese Whispers for the cyberspace.

I was curious about the politics of race and identity in Rani’s story and I asked her these questions.


What is the main difference (in intent, if any) between the performance installation and the digital graphic novel?

My team and I created the digital graphic novel as a way to reach more people, particularly younger generations of Indonesian people first and foremost, with this work. The intent of the work remains the same, which is to create time and space to reflect on a part of Indonesian history that is still often shrouded in ignorance. Just as the performance installation guided audiences one by one through a labyrinth, to engage in meditative reflection, so does the digital graphic novel. One of the key messages to reflect on is how "we cannot heal, what we will not face". My hope is that this question is a relevant one across many of our shared histories, although I use the May 1998 politically motivated racial and sexual violence as one 'launching pad' from which to reflect on this key message.

What is it that you hoped to achieve when you first started this project in 2014 and what has been achieved now with the digital graphic novel?

At the beginning of the research and development for Chinese Whispers, back in 2013, I wanted to find a way to tell Chinese-Indonesian stories on Australian stages. As I delved deeper into the conversations I was having with Chinese-Indonesian diaspora women in Melbourne, however, I slowly realised that what I actually wanted to talk about was May 1998. I then went back to the women I had interviewed and informed them of this shift in my intention with the work. With their consent, I focused the storytelling on my personal experiences with May 1998 and also on socio-historical sources on May 1998, including the human rights activist, Karlina Supelli and the journalist, Dewi Anggraeni.

What I hoped to achieve in 2014 continues to apply today- which is to pass on a story to the younger generations of Indonesian people (whether Chinese identifying or not), about a part of our history that needs to be remembered and a part of our history that we all need to work on learning from, in order to stop it from happening again.

What has been achieved now through the graphic novel is a contribution to a global conversation on the legacies of colonialism. It's really exciting to hear people's responses from Australia to Indonesia to the US, to France, to Italy, to Taiwan... Just to name a few responses I've received since Chinese Whispers went digital!

How has the project been received in Australia and in Indonesia? Have you encountered any cynicism?

Far from cynicism, during the premiere of the performance installation in 2014 at the Melbourne Fringe Festival (where we won Best Live Art and Innovation in Culturally Diverse Practice Awards), younger Indonesian people have come up to me to thank me, because this was a part of our story that their parents were too afraid to expand on. So for them, Chinese Whispers gave a way 'into' this disturbing part of Indonesia's history and the ways this has shaped Indonesian diaspora globally.

In 2018, we launched the Indonesian language digital graphic novel to commemorate the 20-year anniversary of May 1998. The digital graphic novel was launched by the Indonesian Director General of Culture, Dr Hilmar Farid, and moved many to tears! We were also blessed because the timing meant that our work was picked up by many media outlets. Far from cynicism, our readers continue to leave us very generous messages of forgiveness, of unity, of pledging to never forget.

Since the 2000s, there are more works that dealt with the violence against the Chinese in Indonesia, eg. The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. And also the books of Dewi Anggraeni such as My Pain, My Country. Have things improved now? Are people more aware?

My experience of viewing The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence is that it very much focused on the widespread politically motivated violence of 1965, rather than necessarily being focused on the racially motivated violence towards Chinese-Indonesian people. Is that correct?

I think in terms of works about 1998, there has definitely been more and more. In fact I think there has been twenty years' worth of works dedicated to May 1998. But that does not mean that there is more awareness of how anti-Chinese violence is just one colonial tactic that continues to divide our nation, whenever it suits people in power to use for their own ambitions. I would love it if more people asked themselves, "who does it actually benefit when I participate in this kind of hatred" whether towards Chinese, towards West Papuans, towards LGBTIQA+ communities and so on... It's been heartening to see the key demands of the current student led protests which have called for an end to the violence in West Papua, amongst other demands, because that is a show of solidarity for another group in Indonesia that has always been "othered" since being colonized by Indonesia.

Why is the denial of racism (both ways) so strong in Indonesia?

I think it's less a "denial" of racism and more a "normalization" of racism.

Firstly, I want to say that one of the flaws of Chinese Whispers, which I can now see in hindsight is the lack of focus on how the heinous violence of May 1998 was orchestrated to happen. If you read the report of the Fact Finding Team (there's a link to this report at the conclusion of the final chapter), you'll see ample evidence of provocateurs literally being offloaded into majority Chinese areas and then provoking/ inciting violence. So, May 1998 was able to happen because there is a level of normalized "othering" by both Chinese/ non-Chinese (so-called "Pribumi" or "native") but also because the violence was deliberately stoked to explode.

Secondly, in terms of the normalization of racism from "both sides", I do think it's interesting to study the different social, economic and political roles that Chinese played throughout pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial times. For example, even before the Dutch came, the Chinese already played the role of tax collector for many kingdoms in Java and Madura. This was a role that the Dutch exploited and exacerbated during three and a half centuries of colonial era, for example by appointing Chinese Kapiteins which had more political, social and economic powers than the so-called "natives".

When social, economic and political structures are created to divide people, racism is a natural by product of these structures.

Chinese Whispers is also your personal story. Was it hard adjusting to Australia at 12 years old when you move there after the May 1998 riots? Do you consider yourself as part of the diaspora?

Yes, it was very hard. The hardest thing was coming from a very politically charged context (a literal political revolution) and then moving to a very privileged all girls' private school boarding house. Materially speaking, my class privilege has always sheltered me from material hardship and for that I am thankful.

However, the challenges came more in the form of culture shock. More and more as I accumulate years of being based in Australia, the most challenging thing is how to survive and attempt to thrive in a white supremacist society like Australia. I absolutely consider myself a part of the Indonesian, Chindo and Asian diaspora. I wouldn't have lasted this long living on Kulin Country (Melbourne) without my friends who hail proudly from First Nations and diaspora communities.

What are your feelings about Indonesia ?

I love Indonesia. It is a beautiful country with beautiful people. In terms of from my perspective as an artist, I am excited by the explosion of arts and culture (both in terms of artistic practice as well as arts infrastructure) in the past twenty years of relative democracy. I am excited by the embracing of technology by the younger generations. Jokowi recently opened the "1000 startups" conference in Jakarta and to see government ministers in conversation with the younger generations- it's evidence of real future thinking at the national level. At the same time (and this is what Chinese Whispers tries to remind us of), in order to move knowingly into our future, we must embrace the lessons of our past so that we don't repeat our past mistakes. That is my feeling and my hopes for Indonesia.


You can view Rani’s SWF programmes here.

https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/nacswf/nacswf/author-speaker/Rani-Pramesti.html

You can read Chinese Whispers here.

https://thechinesewhispers.com/

sexsexsex: interview with dave cooper (swf 2019)

Thanks to the Canadian Embassy, the Singapore Writers Festival are receiving some cool comics guests for the last 2 years. (in fact, Canada is the country of focus for this year’s SWF) Last year, it was David Collier, quintessential down-to-earth Canadian artist whose appearance in Singapore even got Lat to come down from Ipoh to catch up with this old friend of ours.

I interviewed Collier here:

http://singaporecomix.blogspot.com/2018/10/swf-2018-interview-with-david-collier.html

This year, it is alternative comics provocateur of the 1990s and 2000s, Dave Cooper, who will be coming to town. A rather odd choice for a guest as only old time fans of Fantagraphics Comics (Dave’s publisher) will be familiar with his comics like Suckle, Weasel, Crumple and Ripple. They are fantastical tales of people who are overwhelmed by sex, society, technology and … women.

Some have stood up to rereading like Ripple, which can still make you stand. (Dave is doing a lecture on sex comics at SWF) But Dave has been off the comics grid for some time. He became a fine art artist, a children’s books artist and got into animation for the past 10 years. These are all interesting projects, but thankfully for his comics fans, he has returned to comics with Mudbite (2018), a book collecting 2 new Eddy Table (Dave’s alter ego) stories, Mud River and Bug Bite. Sex and all its bodily fluids return in a big way in Dave’s comics. Maybe he should have a meeting with the minister of population here to talk about sex.

I did an email interview with him and the first question I asked was …

What is the obsession with sex?

Good question. I’m exploring that very question as I write the lecture for the Singapore Writers Festival. I won’t spoil it for you, but it seems to all come down to a number of imprinting experiences I’ve had since childhood, pared with a strange absence of stigma around using sex as a central theme. It just seems to be the thing that drives my work. I find writing and drawing really exhausting most of the time, I’m not the type to doodle constantly in a sketchbook for pleasure. Drawing is more like pushing a car up a hill. But I’ve found from experience over the years that as soon as I insert sex into the equation it’s like I’ve put a key in the ignition.

I just reread Ripple, about the perfect orgasm. After all that build up, we never get to see it. What is it like? Have you experienced it before?

Ha ha! At the time of writing that, it was only a plot device, I’d never experienced it first hand. It was a highly amplified, exaggerated version of the bliss you can feel the first time.

Underground comix artist, Robert Crumb is obviously a big influence for you. But he recently came under heavy backlash in light of the #metoo movement. Any thoughts on that? Are you worried about your portrayals of the female body and physique?

I’m not informed on the Crumb thing. But as for my work, I do wonder how the new generation processes this kind of intentionally provocative and morally ambiguous work. Only time will tell. I can say that the only feedback I ever get from women is enthusiastic. That’s always been a hugely gratifying thing for me. It tells me that my work is often understood, and that my loving sentiment comes through all the confusion.



Do you see yourself as part of the underground comix tradition or linage?

I never feel like a part of anything. I never have. Comics, painting, animation, filmmaking. I’m lucky that my work is well regarded and I love these communities, but there’s something about my personality that keeps me feeling a bit on the outside. Maybe it’s from feeling the black sheep in my own family as a child.

When you were starting out, was there like a Canadian alternative comic artists scene? Drawn & Quarterly and people like Chester Brown, Seth, Julie Doucet and Collier.

Nationalism is another where I feel apart. I’ve never thought of myself as “Canadian” per se. If anything, I may have felt a bit less connected to those authors because I imagined some sort of expectation. I love all those artists you mentioned but their Canadian-ness was never a factor that drew me to them.

Your stories deal with the dissonance between pastoral and civilization, nature and technology, desire and morals, and the child and the man. Do you see the world in such dichotomous terms?

As a person, no I don’t. But when I write and draw, I always seem to slip into these patterns. I’m transported back to my childhood in the woods of Nova Scotia where I became obsessed with nature, with things growing from the earth, or with the way my father could build machinery out of raw metal and wood, or to my pubescence when my obsession with the female form began. I sink under, into a world where exploring all these ideas was an escape, a place where I could feel like I controlled things and my explanations were law.

You moved from comics to music, back to comics, then paintings, children’s books, animation and comics again. Are you ADHD?

Absolutely! Not formally diagnosed, but I definitely need the constant thrill of new projects, unfamiliar challenges. It creates a spark that is absent when I’m doing the same kind of work day in and day out. Initially it happened within the discipline of comics- I’d change my drawing style from book to book. But eventually I started craving the challenge of jumping from one discipline to another. The latest is live-action filmmaking, and after that possibly sculpture.

You moved into animation and you brought along your alter ego, Eddy Table. Eddy is your most enduring character. What makes Eddy so versatile?

He’s just a guy that I never get tired of visiting. I can’t explain it. I just like drawing him. And the fact that he is my alter-ego for my own dream stories, and nonsense stories means that I’ll never run out of stories for him. I don’t enjoy writing real stories with serious intentions and structure so making Eddy stories is always enjoyable.

Eddy gets to do lots of fun thing. Are you Eddy?

Yes. He started as a stand-in for my dream stories. I wanted to use an actual dream, but cartoonize the visuals. I thought it would just make the whole experience more universal if the protagonist was a cartoon character.

Any connection between Eddy Table and Ed the Happy Clown by Chester Brown?

No, that would make sense though. Ed the Happy Clown was one of the most seminal works for me at that time. But no, Eddy Table comes from the word “editable”, meaning easily changed- in other words, malleable to my needs as fickle artist.

Eddy has new adventures in your new book, Mudbite. But Eddy is also the hero in your short animation film, The Absence of Eddy Table. Now what is exciting is that Eddy is voiced by Mike Patton of Faith No More! Was it a kick to work with Mike Patton?

It was comically mundane actually. Our composer is friends with Mike. We asked if he’d consider doing a voice in exchange for us re-purposing footage from our film to make a little music video for him. We never got to meet him, we just sent the movie and soon received his tracks. The director was thrilled, but he had a couple of “notes”- places where he’d like a take 2. Mike’s response was, “there’s no take 2”. Ha ha! Anyway, we were beyond thrilled to have him attached to the project, his work was phenomenal.

What is your process like these days? Still pen and paper or a mix of digital now?

I use digital only for colouring and lettering, and in fact, I'm starting to get a bit fed up of using it to colour. i think i may just go back to black and white drawings, i usually prefer them. Drawing on a computer is something I avoid. I love soft graphite on letter paper, I love ink on strathmore, I love oil paint on canvas. These are visceral experiences for me that I don’t want to give up for expediency. I draw on a computer if there’s a nasty deadline and there’s no other way.

Can tell us more about your new projects, Pillowy and Squash?

Pillowy is the most beautiful publication I’ve ever been associated with. It’s a 400-pg retrospective. All the work I’m still pleased with from the past 30 years. When I look at it I still can’t believe my luck that Cernunnos Publishing would put so much love and care into a book about my work.

Squash is my first foray into live-action filmmaking. A 4-minute film about a jiggly, obsessive woman and her giddy self-gratification. It’s highly stylized and I think it will make a great first effort. Making it was a thrilling challenge. My first day on set as a director I was gratified by an overwhelming feeling of belonging and confidence.

What’s next for you?

I always answer that question with “more of the same, I hope”. I love my career and I just want to keep pushing myself to dig deeper into the same themes that have always motivated me. Bigger paintings, longer films, maybe sculpture. I just love it all and I want to keep finding ways to make it fresh for me.

What have you heard about Singapore?

No chewing gum?

Some say we are really uptight. But then one of our ministers said you don't need much space to have sex and make babies. What do you think of that? Can ripple be achieved in a small space?

Just enough space for two people. Or just one in a pinch.


You can find Dave’s programmes at SWF here:
https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/nacswf/nacswf/author-speaker/Dave-Cooper.html

I am moderating a panel on Outsider Comics with Dave, Ye Zhen and Weng Pixin on 3 November, 3 pm.

https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/nacswf/nacswf/programme-listing/festival-events/Outsider-Comics-.html

You can watch The Absence of Eddy Table here:
https://vimeo.com/blog/post/staff-pick-premiere-the-absence-of-eddy-table-by-rune-spaans/

Life is not shit and you survive: Interview with Ancco (Bad Friends)

Memory is a tricky thing and sense making of the past is important. What is remembered of a particular event, how we remember certain friends and why - they are our ways of navigating through the landscapes of our mind. Sometimes these are places we do not want to revisit. They can be horrific events.

The Korean comic book, Bad Friends by Ancco, awarded the Prix Révélation at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2017, is a horror story. There are no ghosts or monsters to contend with. Just terrible situations involving really bad friends. But what makes these friends so bad that parents, teachers and society are constantly warning you about them? What has happened to them that turned them so bad – family, circumstances and wrong personal choices? And if you ‘wake up’ and abandon them to better yourself, does that make you a bad friend to them?

Some of us experienced these situations, such moments of survivor guilt when you have to let go of your buddies to move on with your life. Friendship and loyalty is a theme much explored in books, music and movies like Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) where the character of Charlie (Harvey Keitel) was dragged down by his friend, Johnny Boy (Robert de Niro), which explains the opening line, “You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.”

Bad Friends tells a similar story from a female point of view, situated in post-Asian financial crisis Korea in the late 1990s, and a slightly different ending. Pearl (Ancco’s alter ego in the story) meets Jeong-Ae, a bad friend. They had lots of fun, getting into fights and giving the finger to the world. They only have each other. They are physically abused by the men in their lives, their fathers and boyfriends. If their mothers and siblings try to intervene, they are beaten up too. It is not a good situation. But in the end, Pearl survives better than Jeong-Ae. Pearl becomes a comic book artist like Ancco in real life. Jeong-Ae disappears and Pearl wonders what has happened to her best friend and how she is doing. She is plagued by questions and survivor guilt.

I will be moderating a panel on The Power of the Graphic Memoir with Ancco as one of the panelists at the Singapore Writers Festival on 3 November and I will be engaging her about Bad Friends. But Ancco asserts that the story is not her autobiography. She told me:

“I mixed many episodes into one story for it to be understandable for the readers. There are parts which I made up as well. I thought it is not important how much of it is based on my life. The important thing is how does it makes the readers focus on the story. I wrote every single characters with my friends in my mind.”

Ancco, whose real name is Choi Kyung-jin and born in 1983, is the first Korean comic artist to win a prize at Angouleme, and Bad Friend was picked up by Drawn & Quarterly, the Canadian comics publisher, for translation and publication in 2018. I am curious why Ancco wrote and drew this book and I did an email interview with her.

Why did you write this book?

I have been constantly thinking that I should write this story since I graduated from high school. Back then, after I became friends with school mates who were known as ‘bad friends’, I started to have a different view of them. When I visited and saw where and how they lived, I felt as if I found where their ‘badness’ came from. Their lives seemed so hard and inappropriate for a teenager. I didn’t mean to advocate for them and their lives, but I just wanted to tell what their lives are about.

There is a lot of guilt in Bad Friends – survival guilt, that we have survived better than some of our friends. Does that necessarily make us bad friends?

For those of us who survived, it doesn’t mean we are ‘bad friends’. But it is true that Pearl (my alter ego in the story) felt guilty about Jeong-Ae. She turned away from Jeong-Ae. That is the choice and reality for some of us.

Another side of the story of Bad Friends is how female friendship can help us get through bad times. Korea is known sometimes for its toxic masculinity, the need for boys and men to be macho. In your opinion, is it true? How bad is it?

I don’t think anyone is forced to be uber masculine and to be macho. Even if the older generation did so, but it is not so now. The men in my comic are in unusual situations. They are also victims of their home situation, their parents, and by extension, of our society. The story is about the darker side of our society. But the men ‘Bad Friends’ cannot be generalized. 


You are born in 1983. You grew up as a child during the period of the Asian Economic Miracle when Korea was one of the Four Asian Tiger Economies. Asian values were celebrated. But the bubble burst in 1997 when the Asian financial crisis happened. Would you say your book is a critique of those times – overconfident capitalism and its problems? (the irony is that the other friend of Pearl who survived now worked in a bank)

I didn’t mean to write about social problems consciously. But I thought it is important to be careful to share the background of the story without distorting the facts. I grew up and lived through that period, I would have been influenced by the environment of a recession struck Korea in the late 1990s. So I thought if I tell the facts, it would work in many ways. And the readers would interpret the story as they like.

For tourists who visited Korea, they may only have a K-pop view of the country and its people. But when I watched movies like Parasite (Bong Joon-ho), I get a very different story. It is the same for manhwa. In 2014, Korea was the Market Focus at the London Book Fair. I attended a presentation by Yoon Tae-ho and the audience associated Korean manhwa with popular webtoons. But reading your comics gives me a very different picture of Korea. What is the truth?

No one vision of Korea can be the truth. There are various forms of life in Korea. I met so-called bad friends in high school. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known about their lives and existence either. This comic is about the lives which we cannot see easily in our daily life.

In Bad Friends, the characters did not have a good time in school. Is there something about the school system that we should change?

The problems of school system in ‘Bad friends’ have changed and have largely disappeared now. Korea is changing very quickly today. But it doesn’t mean that everything has cleared up. There will be other problems that we have not encountered and we still have to solve.

How do you work with the translator, Janet Hong, on the English translation for Drawn and Quarterly?

She has worked more with novelists than with comic artists. As far as I know this is the first time she has translated a comic book. The publisher D&Q requested for her to translate ‘Bad Friends’. I didn’t have to do much for the translation though. When she was trying to come up with an English name for the character of ‘Pearl’, she contacted me and I gave some of my opinions. She understood the comic and the story very well. It was very lucky for us to have her as a translator.

Did winning the prize at Angouleme change your career?

It is almost the same as before actually. As a matter of fact, this kind of serious comics is not popular in Korea. To win the prize at Angouleme as the first Korean comic artist to do so has helped somewhat to let the Korean public know there are such heavy comics like this. And personally, it was meaningful.

What are your new projects?

I am preparing a new project. I was full of darkness when I was working on Bad Friends. After I finished this chapter of darkness, I began to learn what is the brightness in my life. About the brightness which defeats the darkness is my new project.

Finally, did you find out what happen to Jeong-Ae?

My ‘bad’ friend who inspired the character Jeong-Ae? She went through many adversities but she has become a great mother of two children now.


You can look up Ancco’s programmes at SWF here:

https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com/nacswf/nacswf/author-speaker/Ancco.html

You can read parts of Bad Friends here:

https://pen.org/bad-friends/

Here is an interview with the translator of Bad Friends, Janet Hong:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2019/05/14/interview-with-janet-hong-graphic-novels-in-translation/