LONTAR #10 Interviews: Drewscape
Tags: Drewscape, Interview, LontarTo 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.
LONTAR #10 Interviews: Manish Melwani
Tags: Interview, Lontar, Manish MelwaniTo celebrate the tenth and final, double-sized issue of LONTAR, we have three exclusive short interviews conducted by founding editor Jason Erik Lundberg. The first is with Manish Melwani, whose “Sejarah Larangan; or, The Forbidden History of Old Singapura” is the lead-off story. Melwani is a rising star in Singaporean speculative fiction; his first published story appeared in LONTAR #7.
Jason Erik Lundberg: “Sejarah Larangan; or, The Forbidden History of Old Singapura” is a reimagining of a long-mythologised nation-building narrative in Singapore: how Sang Nila Utama, a Srivijaya prince from the Sumatran city of Palembang, named the country Singapura (or “Lion City”) after spotting what many now cite as a tiger upon making landfall. What was it about this myth that made you want to tell a “secret history” of the encounter?
Manish Melwani: Like most Singaporeans, I first learned that myth in primary school. It’s been fascinating to revisit it. The story is part of the Sejarah Melayu, or Malay Annals, which is a collection of regional legends. It contains some fantastic stories, including the tale of Badang, who is sort of a Malayan Hercules and a character in my version too.
After reading around the myth in books like Singapore: A Biography by Mark Ravinder Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea by John Miksic, and Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore, edited by Malcolm Murfett, I was struck by a couple of things about Singapore’s ancient history.
Firstly, the archaeological evidence seems to suggest that Singapore was a trading port as far back as the 13th century. There’s a narrative that this only happened recently, or that it only happened when the British came, but Singapore’s location has always been well-placed for various local and regional maritime powers.
Secondly, the accounts are full of blanks and contradictions. There are multiple versions of the Sejarah Melayu, revised by king after king in order to legitimise their own rule. There are also interesting ways in which these legitimating stories tie into regional and global myths and histories. For example, various rulers in South and Southeast Asia claimed descent from Alexander the Great—including Sang Nila Utama.
I wanted to convey this palimpsest-sense of unreliable history and also to examine the relationship of fables and myths to power, while posing a new origin story or “secret history” of my own, one that incorporated the regional historical context. Weretigers show up a ton in the region’s mythology, and it seemed to come together into an elegant and compelling story premise: Sang Nila Utama lands on the island of Temasek, but it’s not a tiger he mistakes for a lion, it’s a weretiger.
JEL: You establish in the story that Singapore was actually the domain of weretigers (called the harimau jadi-jadian) before humans arrived in the 13th century. It is mentioned that “the bite of the harimau jadi-jadian does not transform the victim, not unless you count being killed as a transformation. No, becoming a harimau jadi-jadian is a matter of magic, not of infection.” Why did you feel the need to subvert the common idea of therianthropy propagation in this way, when we’re so used to seeing in media someone transforming into a werewolf after being bitten by one, for example?
MM: This actually came entirely from the stuff I was reading about weretigers in the Malay Archipelago. Many shamans or otherwise spiritually powerful people apparently have the ability to take on tiger forms. There are also stories about regions where the inhabitants are tigers who can take on human forms—I really like the idea that there are versions where the weretigers are primarily tigers, and others in which they are primarily humans.
JEL: Are there any plans to write more stories about these characters or within this premise?
MM: I’d like to write some little pieces of flash fiction set after the fall of ancient Singapura at the end of this story and before the British arrive. But before I do that, I need to do a lot more research about the Orang Laut, who would be the main characters of that story. Also, a character from this tale may or may not be in my short story “The Tigers of Bengal”, published in LONTAR #7.
JEL: Which authors either from Southeast Asia or writing about Southeast Asia do you enjoy reading? Could you give examples of particular works?
MM: Now that I’m done with my graduate degree, which had me mostly reading early science fiction and doing historical research, I really want to read more Southeast Asian fiction. I just finished Cassandra Khaw’s Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef series, which is set in Kuala Lumpur and is horrific, hilarious and amazing. I’ve also been reading a couple of short story collections, one of which is Alfian Sa’at’s Malay Sketches, a collection of beautiful, insightful, complex little stories about various characters in Singapore’s Malay community. Finally, I literally just started reading Eka Kurniawan’s celebrated novel Man Tiger, and so far, it’s incredible; it’s also a weretiger story, but of a completely different set of stripes.
JEL: Shameless self-promotion time: what is next on the publication horizon for Manish Melwani?
MM: “Sejarah Larangan” is one of several historical Singapore supernatural stories that I wrote as part of my master’s thesis. I’m going to be revising and publishing the rest of those stories, and hopefully putting them out as a collection soon. I’ve also got a couple novellas that I’m working on. One is a space opera: a mummy’s tomb story set in the distant future on a dying planet. The other is a near-future science fiction cosmic horror story about an expedition to the Antarctic: it’s my homage to The Thing and At the Mountains of Madness.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies Author Interview: Michael Haynes
Tags: Andrea Pawley, Author Spotlight, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interview, Michael Haynes, Weightless BooksMichael Haynes, whose story “The Barber and the Count” can be found in Beneath Ceaseless 
Skies Issue 119, answers a few questions for Weightless Books.
Q: How did you first know science fiction and fantasy were for you?
A: My love of science fiction and fantasy short stories stretches back across most of my memory. I come by my affinity for the genres naturally. My parents both have read science fiction and fantasy and when I was young I went along with them to some science fiction conventions. (The 1979 NASFiC was, as far as I know, my first con.) By the time I was ten or so, I was reading and collecting old (mostly 1950’s/60’s) SF/Fantasy anthologies.
Q: Have you found a way to incorporate your love of hockey into your writing?
A: Only in very minor ways. I’ve had a character or two that were hockey fans in stories, but I haven’t written any hockey stories yet. If I did, it would probably be just as likely to be a non-speculative fiction mystery story as SF. I’m also a baseball fan, and when I got really serious about my writing a couple of years ago, one of the first stories I wrote was a baseball SF story titled “Out With the Crowd.”
Q: What’s your favorite place to write?
A: I’m content to write just about anywhere that I can have quiet time to think and compose text — which can be a bit hard with kids around the house! Still, I’ve gotten lots of writing done at a desk in my bedroom or sitting on my bed. I’ve written in coffee shops (Yes, I can be one of those writers!) and in libraries. I’ve even written in the notepad feature of my phone when I had time to kill and no computer at hand.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies is available for DRM-free purchase from Weightless Books. Michael Haynes lives in Central Ohio where he helps keep IT systems running for a large corporation during the day and puts his characters through the wringer by night. An ardent short story reader and writer, Michael had over 20 stories accepted for publication during 2012 by venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show and Daily Science Fiction. He is the Editor for the monthly flash fiction contests run by Kazka Press and an Associate Editor for the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology series.