Liquid City
ISBN: 9781607060277

I’d give this a thumbs-up for highlighting the Southeast-asian talents. I’m sure it’ll serve as inspiration for aspiring graphic novelists and artists from this part of the world.

An anthology of graphic stories (multiple genres).

Similar to Flight and 24Seven, except this is a compendium of Southeast Asian artists/ writers.

The artwork and storylines range from the sophisticated and avant garde (thumbs up from me), to one or two that I felt were simplistic and copycat-ish (i.e. where the visual art appeared too much like fan art rather than creative adaptations, and where scripts contained expletives that seemed to be there for its sake).

The ones that stood out for me:

  • Leong Wan Kok’s (www.1000tentacles.com) “Metamorphosis” (artwork shows loads of effort and remains coherent; nice plot twist, where the bug is the hallucinator). Leong has a second excellent piece that’s just all art work, titled “Invasion”.
  • Ferry Alanguilan’s (www.gerry.alanguilan.com) “Love hurts” (excellent short piece for discussion, as to whether it’s an act of revenge or love)
  • Koh Hong Teng’s “The pouch puppeteer” (there’s something about the way the story is written, taking a simple ‘dying cultural art’ story to give it a humanistic perspective). Koh appears again with “Regrets”, which is a story of childhood loss told entirely with just visuals.

P324 lists the contributors bio.