I’m glad I moved to Toronto. Just three weeks ago, in fact. By accident, I flipped through a local events paper while lunching at a fusion fast food restaurant, and got wind of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) 2013. I could easily have missed it as I had been busy with other matters — and sorely regretted it if I did. This turned out to be my first North American comic convention and in fact, my first comic convention in...

I’m getting some maintenance done for the comic sections of the site. The Dog-Land site looks completely screwed up now because of some backend problems with WordPress. I hope my developer can fix the issue soon. At the same time, I have decided to archive the Anima site. This means there will no longer be a webcomic or any other version of the series. Anima has been a major part of my life and the first comic series I published...

Many people have their own stories to tell when asked why they have decided to move from one place to another. Most of the time, they give lists of the previous place’s flaws and the new place’s benefits. This may not be the most convincing way of persuading others that you’re making the right choice, as the old adage goes: one person’s meat is another’s poison. For example, you might have moved to a small...

The content of this entry is expanded from a talk I gave at the Queen’s University International Centre (Canada) in January 2012. For quite a while, I have thought of penning down my experiences at making and publishing comics, at least for my own sake of recall. The talk at Queen’s was the perfect opportunity to get a structure organized. From there, I can now recount most things chronologically and coherently, which serves as an...

The content of this entry is expanded from a talk I gave at the Queen’s University International Centre (Canada) in January 2012. For quite a while, I have thought of penning down my experiences at making and publishing comics, at least for my own sake of recall. The talk at Queen’s was the perfect opportunity to get a structure organized. From there, I can now recount most things chronologically and coherently, which serves as an...

As some of you might remember, the past year has been a life-changing time for me. I moved across the ocean to Kingston, Canada to read a Master’s at Queen’s University. One crazy year later, I am done. Hunkering up to read a tough, advanced qualification is one thing, but the overwhelming personal, existential journey of being in a new land of new people is life-changing. After all’s said and done, I am oddly left with a lingering...

The content of this entry is expanded from a talk I gave at the Queen’s University International Centre (Canada) in January 2012. For quite a while, I have thought of penning down my experiences at making and publishing comics, at least for my own sake of recall. The talk at Queen’s was the perfect opportunity to get a structure organized. From there, I can now recount most things chronologically and coherently, which serves as an...

I’m pleased to share that since a couple of days ago, Seven Years in Dog-Land is available on the Apple iBookstore. In 1-2 weeks it will also be accessible on the Kindle Fire and Kobo. There’s more: In a couple of months, Dog-Land will expand to the NOOK and Google Books. This is an important step for the accessibility of the Dog-Land. Much credit goes to my digital distributor, Graphicly. Previously, the title was available on major...

The content of this entry is expanded from a talk I gave at the Queen’s University International Centre (Canada) in January 2012. For quite a while, I have thought of penning down my experiences at making and publishing comics, at least for my own sake of recall. The talk at Queen’s was the perfect opportunity to get a structure organized. From there, I can now recount most things chronologically and coherently, which serves as an...

The content of this entry is expanded from a talk I gave at the Queen’s University International Centre (Canada) in January 2012. For quite a while, I have thought of penning down my experiences at making and publishing comics, at least for my own sake of recall. The talk at Queen’s was the perfect opportunity to get a structure organized. From there, I can now recount most things chronologically and coherently, which serves as an...

A long time ago, I had a brief interview with the AP (Associated Press) regarding my first comic, Anima. (Actually it was in 2004, but it feels like another time… ) During the interview, I was asked to comment on the proliferation of comic artists in Singapore who wanted to adopt the manga-style, the highly popular art style of Japanese comics. The foreign journalist was puzzled, because he thought given that Singapore endured a cruel...

A) Why Canadians talk about the weather so much. Because the weather is all-powerful and all-encompassing. This is a country that can have peak temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius in summer and negative 40 in the troughs of winter. Even on a normal Autumn day, the sun’s presence can make a difference of 10 degree Celsius, and the winds will decide if you really need a coat outdoors. The weather can be both a benevolent and harsh...

The most common thing editors do is cutting the length of an article so that it fits into a certain space constraint. It’s not as easy as it sounds, because this involves judging whether the core content of the article still remains after your edit, and whether the whole story still ‘flows’ seamlessly. There’s much more to being a fine editor, which I might expound in a future post; I’d like to share something...

I’m not sure how rampant this is in other countries, but here’s a problem caused by Singapore’s universities and tertiary schools that can herald more serious consequences than they foresee: the fudging of average starting salaries of their recent graduates. Reading the figures every year can be a very humbling experience. According to the numbers, the average bachelor’s degree holder should make S$5000-6000 dollars at his first...

Before I left for Canada, I had the opportunity to interview the Provost/ Deputy President of my alma mater, Singapore Management University, for a feature I was asked to produce. It’s ironic that in my 3-and-a-half years there I’d never had as much face-to-face time with a Provost or equivalent person. This article appeared in the August 2011 (Issue 12) of Insights, a business-oriented newsletter of the university. All ideas...