Ending this personal retrospective on my last big comics effort, “A Challenge”. Feels like I’ve talked about this ad nauseam, but I blinked and suddenly it’s been 8 years since the Kickstarter. Whatever ambitions I’d had while making it have been sanded away since then, but I knew from Day 1 that I’d be a “Comics Lifer”. So as long as I can hold a pen and have even an ounce of desire to keep drawing, I’ll get back on the horse eventually.

I saw my first Kaiju Big Battel show, along with Les Savy Fav, at Mass Art in 2002 and I was an instant fan. One of my college friends eventually started performing with them and I’d also become friendly with some of the performers/ designers. 

2006-09: I was stoked to be a part of the super-cool “Lifemeter” video game comic anthologies, edited by Dave Roman, Stephanie Yue, and Zack Giallongo. I accidentally broke the rules on the 1st issue with my “Contra” comic since I incorporated the Nintendo controller [stories were supposed to strictly take place within the world of the games], but fortunately they still included it. I wonder if the kids today still know the Konami code.

Starting sometime in 2006, this was one of my earliest attempts at a longer story [eventually clocking in at almost 60 pages]. When Joe got back from his first tour with The Sleeping, I was so entertained by his stories on the road that I had him re-tell them as I recorded it on cassette. That tape became the “script” and a simple way for me to start a relatively more ambitious comic.

In between spasms of rage resulting from living in a failed state saddled with dead weight, I distracted myself by reflecting on some older work this past weekend. My website overhaul reminded me that many of my comics were created pre-social media so I’ll be sharing some bits/ commentary.

I finally redesigned my website after digging through volumes of my work for months. Prior to the redesign, I hadn’t updated it in almost a decade, while the original design had been unchanged since 2005. The undertaking was unexpectedly painful, revisiting past lives. While I allowed myself to feel a bit of pride in my accomplishments, I was alternately overwhelmed by the quantity of decades of work while feeling insignificant in the face of current events.

I just wanted to tell an Asian-American story. I'm still unsure that coding parts of my personal life into historical fiction was the best way for me to do it, but here's a bit of context in an attempt to make sense of my time working on this comic.