The content of this entry is expanded from a talk I gave at the Queen’s University International Centre (Canada) in January 2012. For quite a while, I have thought of penning down my experiences at making and publishing comics, at least for my own sake of recall. The talk at Queen’s was the perfect opportunity to get a structure organized. From there, I can now recount most things chronologically and coherently, which serves as an...

I’m pleased to share that since a couple of days ago, Seven Years in Dog-Land is available on the Apple iBookstore. In 1-2 weeks it will also be accessible on the Kindle Fire and Kobo. There’s more: In a couple of months, Dog-Land will expand to the NOOK and Google Books. This is an important step for the accessibility of the Dog-Land. Much credit goes to my digital distributor, Graphicly. Previously, the title was available on major...

The content of this entry is expanded from a talk I gave at the Queen’s University International Centre (Canada) in January 2012. For quite a while, I have thought of penning down my experiences at making and publishing comics, at least for my own sake of recall. The talk at Queen’s was the perfect opportunity to get a structure organized. From there, I can now recount most things chronologically and coherently, which serves as an...

The content of this entry is expanded from a talk I gave at the Queen’s University International Centre (Canada) in January 2012. For quite a while, I have thought of penning down my experiences at making and publishing comics, at least for my own sake of recall. The talk at Queen’s was the perfect opportunity to get a structure organized. From there, I can now recount most things chronologically and coherently, which serves as an...

A long time ago, when I was just twelve years-old, I got on to the front page of the newspapers for having drawn more than a hundred comic books. It was an unusual feat for a child, I bet, and I earned me a few weeks of fame. And after that… nothing else happened. There were no talent scouts, corporate sponsors, eager publishers or jaded but brilliant mentors. From that exhilarating time when I felt I could actually be wildly successful...

A long time ago, I had a brief interview with the AP (Associated Press) regarding my first comic, Anima. (Actually it was in 2004, but it feels like another time… ) During the interview, I was asked to comment on the proliferation of comic artists in Singapore who wanted to adopt the manga-style, the highly popular art style of Japanese comics. The foreign journalist was puzzled, because he thought given that Singapore endured a cruel...

A) Why Canadians talk about the weather so much. Because the weather is all-powerful and all-encompassing. This is a country that can have peak temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius in summer and negative 40 in the troughs of winter. Even on a normal Autumn day, the sun’s presence can make a difference of 10 degree Celsius, and the winds will decide if you really need a coat outdoors. The weather can be both a benevolent and harsh...

The most common thing editors do is cutting the length of an article so that it fits into a certain space constraint. It’s not as easy as it sounds, because this involves judging whether the core content of the article still remains after your edit, and whether the whole story still ‘flows’ seamlessly. There’s much more to being a fine editor, which I might expound in a future post; I’d like to share something...

It exists, waiting to be found by the most gifted of visual storytellers. It resides in our deepest dreams, in the wind, in the infinity of spaces between the panels of innumerable comics and graphic novels – the ninth art. The ninth art has accompanied human culture since cave people scrawled tales of their hunting trips on their cave walls. Yet even today, only a rare few understand, and even less practise, the Riddle. It eludes...

If you have been waiting for the print edition of Seven Years in Dog-Land, you must be like me – someone who still prefers to hold and read a tome in the hand. We’re a dying breed in the age of digital and mobile content. Not that I’m complaining – the Internet has allowed many more people to know about Dog-Land. Books may hold a special place in history but ultimately, it is not books that transmit knowledge from one...

I’m not sure how rampant this is in other countries, but here’s a problem caused by Singapore’s universities and tertiary schools that can herald more serious consequences than they foresee: the fudging of average starting salaries of their recent graduates. Reading the figures every year can be a very humbling experience. According to the numbers, the average bachelor’s degree holder should make S$5000-6000 dollars at his first...

Before I left for Canada, I had the opportunity to interview the Provost/ Deputy President of my alma mater, Singapore Management University, for a feature I was asked to produce. It’s ironic that in my 3-and-a-half years there I’d never had as much face-to-face time with a Provost or equivalent person. This article appeared in the August 2011 (Issue 12) of Insights, a business-oriented newsletter of the university. All ideas...

It surprises many of my new friends that multiculturalism is a ‘hot potato’ issue in Singapore, just as it is in leading immigration destinations such as Canada, the USA and the UK. In fact, I’m inclined to say that multiculturalism is even more fiercely debated in Singapore. If you Google the term ‘multiculturalism’, nearly half of the articles on the first page have something to do with Singapore at the time of this writing. The...

Well I did it. I have hauled myself and a considerable portion of my life’s belongings, stuffed into three luggage bags, and traversed 16,000 kilometres across the globe to Canada, my new home for the time being. Those hectic weeks leading up to the journey, shuffling through paperwork and carry-on lists were just the beginning of the tumultuous trip. Equally unforgettable were the longest flight in my life (25 hours) into a continent I...

Five years. It’s a considerable length of time, once you get your head around the idea. A lot can happen in five years. And a lot has. Five years ago in 2006, I had not yet held a full-time office job, though I had clocked in more than a decade of freelance and self-employment experience. Five years later I have accumulated considerable experience as an international-level editor in 3 different industries, and produced for a vast...