LONTAR #10 Interviews: Drewscape
Tags: Drewscape, Interview, Lontar
To celebrate the tenth and final, double-sized issue of LONTAR, we have three exclusive short interviews conducted by founding editor Jason Erik Lundberg. The second is with Andrew Tan (who goes under the nom de plume of Drewscape), whose short comic “Rewire” is the first in the journal’s history to be published in full colour. Drew is the author of Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise, which garnered a nomination for the Eisner Award, and The Ollie Comics: Diary of a First-Time Dad.
Jason Erik Lundberg: “Rewire” uses as its premise the transformation of an android into a “real” woman who soon outgrows her creator’s programming, harkening back to My Fair Lady and even farther back to the myth of Pygmalion. What was it about this type of story that inspired you to put your science-fictional spin on it?
Drewscape: I usually get my inspiration from things I myself experience and also from trying to understand how others think. For this story, I wanted to tackle the issue of how, in a romantic relationship, we often try to change another person to suit our requirements, only to find that they really can’t change. However, in the end, I suspect that there is still some change that happens to us after going through that relationship.
JEL: You made the conscious choice to eschew spoken language in this comic, and in fact, the only text present at all is on a banner for the Inventor Awards and on a mobile phone as a SMS message. What was your thinking behind presenting all thought-bubble speech using pictograms?
D: This comic was originally commissioned by a publisher in France, and we were toying with the idea of doing a wordless comic so we wouldn’t have to bother with translating from English to French. I found that it made the conversational parts a lot breezier because it used fewer frames, but I also had to communicate more with body language to convey the point clearly. Some things were hard to get around, like the text message and the awards banners; the characters did live in a world where printed text existed, after all. So I left those in. It was fun trying it out, but this is the only comic I’ve done in this format. I still prefer speech balloons with text. Oh, and in the end, the French publication was cancelled, so this is the comic’s first appearance.
JEL: You’ve created other comics that could be rightly qualified as non-realist (particularly in your collection Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise), but many of your comics recently have taken a more realist approach, especially in exploring fatherhood. Will you be returning to science-fictional or fantastical stories in the future?
D: Yes, I’m working on more sci-fi/fantastical stories now. I find they are a lot more flexible when it comes to presenting themes, and one can also disguise real-life stories into them to make them richer. “The Giggly Floating Fish” in Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise was one such story that was based in real life and disguised as sci-fi.
JEL: Which comics creators from Southeast Asia do you enjoy reading? Could you give examples of particular works?
D: I don’t read that many comics these days. But the ones I’ve enjoyed are The Resident Tourist series by Troy Chin and, more recently, Kungfu Dough by Don Low and Terumbu by Cheah Sinann. I also admire the quality of work in the graphic novels of Sonny Liew.
JEL: Shameless self-promotion time: what is next on the publication horizon for Drewscape?
D: I like to keep things secret until I have something good to show. That gives me more freedom and less pressure to create. But I hope to get something out by end this year or next year. That’s if I manage to discipline myself to just sit down every day, not get distracted and finish longer stories, page by page. That can be hard.