You May Have Opium With Breakfast
Art by Jackie Roche.
Published by the good eggs at The Nib in their 2022 Food Edition. If you’ve ever wondered about the feeding habits of the British Empire’s soldiers in Sri Lanka, this two-page comic is for you. My pictures of the print edition aren’t doing justice to Jackie’s art, so please do read it on The Nib’s website.
You’re wondering why this section is the only one that looks like the rest of the site. But have you noticed the wonderful terracotta tiles underfoot? So cooling on the soles, don’t you think? Come this way, let me show you the garden…
කොට යකා / Short Devil
Art by Shenuka Corea
‘Kota Yaka’ is slang for ‘short devil,’ but not ‘devil’ in the way Abrahamic faiths use it. In Sri Lankan mythology, there are countless devils, each with their own powers and responsibilities. They are not always evil.
The Yaka in this comic inhabits a modern, cosmopolitan Sri Lankan city. He’s used to delicious, edible humans flowing past him like kaiten-zushi. But he’s tiny, and easily irritable, and rides a cat who may have plans to eat him.
Then he finds himself in the countryside, with no fast food at all.
This was an attempt at using the visual language of manga to make a small story with no dialogue. We submitted it to the Silent Manga Audition and got flattened (rightly so). Learned a lot, though. The judges were kind and helpful in their critique.
Two nameless, bickering beings run a restaurant in a brightly-coloured wasteland. Their customers are eccentric, unreasonable and in one case, possibly a god.
Words and pictures by me. Here’s a review —but given who wrote it — I’m not sure it’s a compliment:
“Reading Wait Non Anon gave me the same feeling I got when trying to decipher Ulysses decades ago. Considered the greatest novel of all time by some, I struggled to get past page 50. Wait Non Anon has 54 pages and I have read every one of them, thrice. So by that metric, this is clearly the superior book. Plus Ulysses doesn’t have any cool pics.
Deshan Tennekoon is a polymath, an obscurist and a compounder of the absurd. His mad graphics skills are better than James Joyce’s.”
— Shehan Karunatilaka, winner of the 2022 Booker Prize
There. You’ve been warned by an actual, award-winning author. If you still want to read WNA —a comic about memory, god, soup and time— then you are braver and more patient than most. I salute you. Happy reading!
Wait Non Anon
Kingdom Animalia
Art by Lisa Marie Chambers
Welcome to the last days of humanity!
Join our Glorious Species as it fights perfectly normal animals who want nothing more than to be left alone!
Satellites, Salmon and Spaceships
Art by Shenuka Corea
This short comic is part of the Cowboy Bebop anthology, published by ShortBox. Shenuka and poked around the frayed edges of the Cowboy Bebop universe and rediscovered Jobim, Antoni and Carlos. We wanted you to meet them while they living their <ahem> best lives, long before they got yanked into Spike’s shenanigans.
Graftage
Art by Linki Brand
This comic was made for the 24Panels anthology to raise money for people with PTSD caused by the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017. There’s still copies on sale - please buy one if you can.
When we made this comic, Linki and I had never worked on a comic before, but we’d worked well together on books for children (this is our latest).
I’m so glad we made this comic.
August in Pasikuda
Art by Isuri
This is probably our first attempt at fragmenting a visual haiku by using the language of comics. We made this for INKBRICK - a really brilliant poetry comics anthology series that sadly, shuttered recently (you can still buy copies at the link though). Editor Alexander Rothman has some work on his site, too if you’re hungry for more poetry comics.
Metta Helmet
Art by Isuri
Proud of this one: it shares 1/37th of an Eisner Award and of an Ignatz, too.
Isuri and I were selected for inclusion in Taneka Stotts’ anthology, Elements: Fire in 2017/18. This comic was later re-published in the Eisner Award-winning PanelxPanel, a superb comics crit magazine run by the excellent Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, who makes Strip Panel Naked.
For a wordless tale about kindness, pangolins, and little old ladies, set in a post-apocalyptic Sri Lankan wasteland, that’s pretty good, I reckon.
‘Visual Haiku’ is an ugly term*
Art by Thilini Perera
Thilini made five pages of art in this 6-page visual haiku using her environment, her scanner, and her wits. Then she hand-cut the letters for half the poem; wrote the other half; and for the skeleton and moon on page 1, she hunted online, edited and refined. I hope she learned her lesson.
Our mad little experiment in fragmenting the form of a haiku was published by the amazing, generous crew at INKBRICK.
* Properly speaking, this one is a ‘haiga’, given that it’s haiku + illustration. But even then, at a fundamental level, ‘haiku’ doesn’t quite work — it follows the 5-7-5 structure as defined in English, but it lacks the formality and perspective shift — which would make it a ‘zappai’. It’s probably not a ‘senryu’, since it’s not about human foibles and it’s not very funny. Dunno. Need to do more reading.
Short Hop*
This weird poem appeared in the poetry comics anthology Over the Line, edited by Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone (Sidekick Books, 2015).
In a surprise twist (for me, at least) Alan Moore’s blurb for the book said:
“This is that spine-tingling moment when two attractive and sophisticated forms, both admired for their rhythm and sense of timing, eye each other across the cultural dance floor. In Over The Line, at once an insightful introduction and a comprehensive showcase for the emerging phenomenon of Poetry Comics, Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone provide the best possible venue for what looks like being a breathtaking tango. I really can’t recommend this venture highly enough, and I’d advise you mark your card immediately.”
Copies are still available at the link, above. If you want to see what happens when two old artistic forms collide, and you can spare the cash,
* Given that the poem addresses a mundane moment (if you were a time traveller), I reckon this qualifies as a science fiction senryu or zappai. Either way, hadrosaurs are cool.