A look at Special Comix 3
The first thing you'll notice is that the book is ridiculously huge. I was expecting it to be the size of Bottomless Belly Button--no. It's double the size of Bottomless Belly Button, so it's actually like I brought four BBB's home with me. For reference, here it is with my hand:
The content of the book is substantially more varied than the examples I'm about to give you (especially considering it's over 600 pages), but there's a limit to your patience and I want to show you guys some of the coolest stuff I saw in it, and my tastes run a certain way, so! Sorry about the crappy iPhone pictures--I leveled them best I could, but they're still not as sharp as I'd like.
These spreads are from my favorite story in the book. Totally thrilling:
And others, chosen mostly for their polish (sorry):
My friend in China who's into comics tells me that government-backed works always have to be educational somehow--they always have to have a fairly explicit moral, because of Confucianist values and all that? I'll write up a post about what I've seen of the mainstream Chinese comics scene and the alt Chinese comics scene (sort of like Popgun) and the galleries, but now I'm going to sleep the sleep of the jet-lagged.
P.S. I'll also be bringing both copies of SC3 down to San Francisco with me when I visit (Feb 20-25) and those of you in SF can pore over it to your heart's content. One of them's for Ryan (Sands). International shipping is apparently around $65 USD for this baby, whereas intra-Beijing express shipping is $6 for two. :)
The content of the book is substantially more varied than the examples I'm about to give you (especially considering it's over 600 pages), but there's a limit to your patience and I want to show you guys some of the coolest stuff I saw in it, and my tastes run a certain way, so! Sorry about the crappy iPhone pictures--I leveled them best I could, but they're still not as sharp as I'd like.
These spreads are from my favorite story in the book. Totally thrilling:
And others, chosen mostly for their polish (sorry):
My friend in China who's into comics tells me that government-backed works always have to be educational somehow--they always have to have a fairly explicit moral, because of Confucianist values and all that? I'll write up a post about what I've seen of the mainstream Chinese comics scene and the alt Chinese comics scene (sort of like Popgun) and the galleries, but now I'm going to sleep the sleep of the jet-lagged.
P.S. I'll also be bringing both copies of SC3 down to San Francisco with me when I visit (Feb 20-25) and those of you in SF can pore over it to your heart's content. One of them's for Ryan (Sands). International shipping is apparently around $65 USD for this baby, whereas intra-Beijing express shipping is $6 for two. :)