City of fluid tales
Shadow
Published by Image Comics, Liquid City Volume 3 collects 22 stories and eight pin-ups from 31 creators from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, all of whom were tasked with telling the story they would most want to tell if they knew the world was ending.
The result isn’t quite what you would expect, though, as it turns out artists and writers from this region have a pretty strange concept of the end of the world.
A Malaysian’s tale of a strange encounter with a deity ( Disappearance, by Aks Kwan); a Singaporean’s journey to becoming a man through National Service ( Boy, by Elvin Ching); a Vietnamese’s account of life growing up on a pig farm ( Pig When
by Nguyen Thanh Phong); an Indonesian’s memories of her grandmother ( Bloemen Blij Plukken Wij, by Tita Larasati) ... these are hardly your typical “end of the world” stories.
They may not be the apocalyptic epics you expected, but there is a certain charm and wonderful diversity to be enjoyed from the tales told here.
Take, for instance, the wonderfully whimsical Living The Last Day Of Everyone’s Life, by Malaysian/ Australian Jin Hien Lau, one of three semi-autobiographical stories collected here. A tale of a 10-yearold who is convinced that the world is about to end after watching a bizarre emergency news programme on TV,
Jin’s contribution is a comical tribute to childhood innocence with a streak of poignancy that somehow got me thinking about MY own childhood and how blissfully carefree those days were.
Equally amusing is iPocalypse, by Singaporean artist Adrian Ngin, who imagines the old uncles and aunties frequenting Singapore’s neighbourhood coffeeshops as superheroes with special powers like shooting organic tomatoes out of their armpits. Don’t ask.
Not all the stories are set in the creators’ homes and cultures though – there ARE others that are