“Stronger Than Me” by Amy Winehouse… “You should be stronger than me. You’ve been here seven years longer than me. Don’t you know you’re supposed to be the man. Now pale in comparison to who you think I am. You always want to talk it through, I don’t care. I always have to comfort you when I’m there…”

Do you know what the greatest thing in the world is? Go on, guess. No, it’s not love. I wish it would be, but ask anyone who’s looking for meaning at the bottom of a whisky bottle why that isn’t so. No, it’s not wealth and it’s not wisdom, though being able to pay for anything and knowing what you want will set you up for a lifetime of luxury.

The greatest thing in the world is multi-tasking. Without this, the world would surely crumble. Without this, we would indeed crumble. Being able to carry out more than one task at any given moment is something we’re all likely to be taking for granted, whether your preferred method is eating breakfast in the car whilst driving to work, or catching up on the latest gossip with your friend on the phone whilst clipping your toenails. In short, we don’t have a lot of time on this Earth so we might as well make the most of it. The average for men is about seventy years and for women its another ten years or so on top of that. This would explain the great pleasure we get when we change to a train on the opposite platform and cut our journey home by two minutes. This would explain why men like vehicles of velocity and why women adore taking long baths. This would also explain why some male brainiacs somewhere are butting heads, trying to achieve efficient teleportation above the molecular level. We plainly need a teleporter introduced into our daily lives. It would be the greatest invention in the history of mankind (emphasis on “man”) and the only thing that would come close to beating that would be the invention of a device that erases our indecisiveness when it comes to knowing where we want to go when the world is just a heartbeat away. If it had an additional feature that told you which places and people to avoid for a less stressful and happier life, it would be on my Christmas list no doubt.

By the time teleportation is invented and becomes commonplace, it would nudge the crown off multi-tasking’s head and take its place as the greatest thing in the world. It would probably take centuries till they perfect it, then there would need to be a few more decades after that till the technology became so cheap that everyone outside of Malaysia and Singapore could have it. Imagine that; a glorious world with teleportation at our fingertips. We could get so much done! As it is, I take great pride in shortcuts and the occasional speeding, but with the power of teleportation, I’d become a real thief of time; stealing a minute here and a moment there so that my time on this Earth is optimised big time stylee. I once read that we spend a third of our lives waiting. That’s an awful lot of time to be expecting something, especially if you’re the unfortunate soul to be waiting for certain things like the next evening train, exam finals results, or the perfect man/woman. That statistic has some significant weighting over the carnage of Christmas shopping too, especially last minute shopping.

I was in the city yesterday for the whole day and it was busy, but not quite the battle for middle earth scenario that I was expecting. I guess most people have done all their Christmas shopping by now but some people fail to learn their lesson each year. Some people are inherently masochistic in that they love high (blood) pressure shopping and leaving their Christmas shopping till the last few days, turning an ordinary task into an extreme sport. I estimate that the average store will have you in a queue waiting to be served for about thirty minutes on top of what you’d normally encounter out of season. Us men certainly don’t have that amount of time to spend holding our shopping whilst twiddling our thumbs and adjusting our mistletoe hats. This could explain why women love to shop and spend hours upon hours doing just that. They have a longer average lifespan, so sure, they have the time to do it. For as long as there has been currency, women have been mad on shopping and over the years evolution may have catered to this practice. Evolutionarily speaking, it would be difficult to determine whether the desire for shopping resulted in a longer lifespan or vice versa. From a male point of view I’d have to say that it’s more likely that a longer lifespan results in a heightened ability to shop, because shopping can be pretty darn stressful, especially in those women’s clothes stores. The worst is during the sales; a time during which women will temporarily mutate into fashion inflicted berserkers that are prepared to gouge the opposition’s eyes out in a flurried attempt to get the last discounted size eight dress.

In recent years, possibly the greatest notable technological centrepiece is, of course, the masterpiece that is the Internet. It’s funny too how the internet has revolutionised the way we communicate with each other. It would have been unperceivable twenty years ago for you to be reading this on your monitor let alone fathom the concept of blogging. The funny thing is that no matter how cheap the cost of communication gets and no matter how plentiful the methods in which you can communicate with people become, we’ll still lose touch with friends and still be crap at keeping up with the Joneses. The internet means that you can send mail for free and the price of a phone call just gets cheaper with time and still we all fail to communicate. These are all great innovations, but sadly poorly executed due to that darn thing called human nature. Even if we were all implanted at birth with a communication chip to be able to transfer our thoughts to each other, you can bet your bottom dollar you’d still be crap at catching up with your friends. All you’d have to do is mentally dial up your friend to talk to them, but even that would become a chore, or a headache. Yes, a headache. That’s the reason you’ll give for not communicating with them telepathically with your bio-implant (and will eventually surpass the current number one application for that excuse, to deny your partner “bedtime privileges”). The reason for this behaviour is not in the cost or inconvenience of communication. It’s because we’re all preoccupied with our own little worlds and the immediate things that revolve around it. When there’s a deadline for that essay, talking to your friend whom you haven’t spoken to in a week will drop to a rank in the priority line below renting the latest movie from your local video store, unless your friend happens to have the answer to question three of that essay. I am guilty of this too, because I am human. When it comes to keeping in touch, I just forgive and I forget. It’s the new taboo.

It’s two days till Christmas and I’ve spotted no travelling door-to-door carol singers yet, but dad is singing a lot more lately in preparation for his music theory test. They’re not carols he’s singing, but it’s him singing sweetly nevertheless and in a strange way it lends the house a more Christmassy vibe. The afternoon of Christmas eve will be my mum’s annual extreme grocery shopping period. Supermarkets don’t open on Christmas day and not usually on Boxing day either, so by Christmas eve, they’ll try to sell all of their perishables, fresh goods and turkeys. They do so by marking them all down to a fraction of their standard retail price, so I’m counting on my fridge gaining weight along with the general human population.

Random thought: You know what I miss? Those juice concentrates my mum always used to buy when I was a kid. You know, those cordial mixtures that you dilute to taste, like Ribena, Vimto and Robinson’s orange and lemon. I was a fairly sweet toothed kid and buying these drinks in carton form never afforded room for customising sweetness. However, those bottled concentrates allowed you to go a bit wild. There’s a recommended amount to place in a glass before diluting it to the brim, but I always used to put in a few more millilitres of concentrate than suggested. I liked it sweet, but not like my nihilistic friend from high school who used to mix the concentrated juice and water at a ratio of near 1:1. I saw him again the other week. Totally blew my mind when I noticed he still had teeth.

Lately I’ve been back to the drawing board, literally, because I’ve started sketching again. I’ve always nursed ambitions of producing my own graphic novel/comic and I’ve had my ideas written down for ages with a sparse amount of drawings to accompany them. I’ve never done a lengthy piece and most of mine are a result of spontaneous inspiration. For example, here’s one from the archives that I drew during a lecture in University, involving a couple of friends. It was drawn on lined notepad paper but I’ve cleaned it up and inserted typed dialogue to make it more intelligible).

Some relevant side-info: The one with the shaved sideburns in the first panel is Yogi. He used to have a quiff and was looking a lot like a stoic version of Elvis back then. He is later seen eating a sandwich, because he was known to carry sandwiches in his tiffin box, which he brought from home. This way, he could eat regardless of isolation and/or impatience to find a place to eat in time. Sanje is the noticeably big guy in the panels. He used to be very big (If you like them big and cuddly, drop me a line and I will pass you his phone number). Last year he was twenty-one stone. Now he’s shed down to a modest eighteen stone and fastly casting off the pounds. He’s planning his exercise trajectories to arrive at a size that will eventually allow him to play hide and seek in a thinly populated forest come the summer. He’s also going to need a new wardrobe by the summer, so he hopes. The comic strip ended there because I believe the introductory Biochemistry lecture ended there. I can’t remember what was going to be in the next panel, but it was going to possibly be one of my friends who smokes. I can’t remember why I never finished it either, but I’m going to leave it unfinished as a reminder of my procrastination.

Having attempted it, I know very well how long it takes to produce a page of a comic, which is why I take the time to properly read the ones I like and I mean really read it. Read the dialogues uttered and the lines on character’s faces. In fact, read every line on the page. I’ll try not to miss a line of detail because this is the way I would want others to view my own work. I particular like looking at uninked penciled artwork and tracing imaginary lines over it, as though they were my own. I love the roughness and spontaneity of penciled sketches and it’s the crudeness in their details that make the adjoining lines come to life. A lot of this is lost when the ink comes in to coat the pencil lines, but even this can be done with as much or as little detail as desired. Derek Kirk Kim’s Same Difference is a great example of how a simple style can be adopted and still convey the full spectra of emotions in its story (Same Difference from his Small Stories collection is one of my favourites of all time). A large part of the genius is his ability to write people so well, as well as draw them. Achieving a great balance between the two is considered the height of enlightenment for comic book writer-cum-artists. Being amazing at both opens up the pores through which fantastical creative work of substance flows and consequently makes you the envy of millions of fanboys and fangirls.

Love stories involving robots are always excellent too (no, seriously). Human emotion is not completely understood and there’s much speculation that it’s solely the chemicals between us that elicit such a reaction. Isaac Asimov wrote a series of fictional books about robots, where he outlines the three laws of robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

You may have heard that laws are made to be broken, by the turbulent tike who was in your high school Chemistry class. While this doesn’t work for things like Newton’s staunch laws, it allows interesting stories in cases involving Asimov’s laws (e.g. the Terminator films are a testament to Asimov’s laws being broken). In the Robot series, Asimov’s first book, I, Robot, is a collection of short stories about robot growing pains and robot endeavour. In his books, there are robots indistinguishable from humans, which laid the pipework for other stories like Star Trek and Blade Runner. The latter inspired me to write a story in the works about a synthetic human called Cera who spends much of her battery life trying to understand how much what she feels is different to what humans feel.

One popular topic is of course that which we don’t really understand ourselves: love. What if robots can mimic human emotion and fall in love? There’s one graphic novel that comes to mind, which takes robot and human interaction as its premise and that’s Nufonia Must Fall, written and drawn by one of my favourite DJs who goes by the moniker of Kid Koala. Packaged with the book is a CD with a tracklist telling you what pages you should be reading for a particular track. I really love this concept and I’m surprised it’s not that common. For my own, I’d certainly like to try this method. Music helps to set the mood for many things.

[A panel from Nufonia Must Fall]

One problem I frequently encounter when drawing comic strips is maintaining consistency with character detail. The same character may look different in the adjacent panel and it’s definitely due to me using too much detail in addition to not being good enough to carry detail effectively across the pages. So now, I’m trying to develop a simplified style, which should look cleaner and be much easier to draw. I’ve come up with the following.

These are the concepts for Cera, whom I mentioned earlier. The first illustrates the usual style I draw in, which involves some level of detail. The second is the same, but simplified. I’ve also attempted to modernise it in a few ways. Notice how the eyes now have epicanthic folds and how there is a general Asian-ness to the drawing with the narrower and longer faces. That will be the Manga-isation machine in me kicking in.

One thing I am glad to have in my possession right now is the recently published comic, Absent (originally a web comic produced by Hwei). I’ve always loved her art, which is very distinctive and has a hint of Blade of the Immortal style, which some inspiration is obviously drawn from. You could put the art up in two different places and one would be identifiable with the other. This distinctiveness and uniqueness is a great thing to have and is the basis by which any illustrator should carve out their story’s universes. Like her other works, Absent is simple, but gorgeous and well left for the reader to decipher its meaning for him/herself. For me, it’s a story about discovery; about music and love and the other things we try to fill the void in ourselves with. It’s about finding the emptiness within ourselves so that we can search for the things that will complete us. This interpretation should hold steady with most people’s views on the story, for aren’t we all on this Earth trying to do the same thing: to complete ourselves?

[A panel from Absent]