The initial stages of turning people’s real world experiences into stories involves gathering their stories. Sometimes a fully scripted, visualised and structured script arrives in my inbox! But more often than not, this stage involves getting to know contributors and paying close attention to how their distinctive character manifests in this small anecdotal experience that they’re sharing with us.
It’s important to have these stories shared in the most comfortable format for the contributor so that I can have a real sense of their personality and their voice isn’t lost behind structure or too much overthinking. The intimacy of the comics medium – where one’s attention is pulled into a book; and further into a page; and further into a panel; and even further into a bubble – works well with the the casual quality of a friend recounting a personal experience.
Here is an excerpt from one of these stories – a recording of my meeting with Jun-Woo Do, a Korean international student who recounted his experiences how Chinatown represented a larger cultural clash for him upon arrival in Australia.
Check in over the next several days, when we’ll see Juno’s story written up, broken down, laid out, sketched, inked and composited together.
[...] it’s a very fitting five page introduction to the collection. View how this was made from interview to writing and artwork in the past few [...]