maiji: perhaps. (Suikoden I/V fancomic)

[images: 1) Photo collage with different views of "perhaps.", a Suikoden I & V doujinshi with its specs: 5.5x4.25", 16 pages, full colour with a translucent cover, pamphlet stitch. The cover is Shoon from Suikoden V looking out to the sea on translucent paper on the right, and the layer beneath has Morgan from Suikoden I walking along the shore on the left. The booklet binding is in aqua-coloured thread. The bottom right shows wip images of a page where Shoon is crying, first as rough sketch, then as detailed pencil sketch, then with a layer of watercolour shading on top. 2) Composited cover image of both Shoon and Morgan layers together. It reads, in hand-drawn text mimicking a serif typeface: “perhaps. - Suikoden I & V / by Maiji/Mary Huang”]"perhaps." is an old Suikoden I and V fancomic/booklet made in 2009. Medium: Pencil and watercolour. Comic pages and transcript. [READ-MORE]Inside cover: Interior black and white cover of Morgan walking along the shore.Page 1: Hand-written text mimicking a serif typeface over light washes of watercolour. It's a quote in Latin. “Forsan et haec olim meminisse - Virgil, The Aeneid, Book I”Page 2: Hand-written dialogue over light washes of watercolour.?: Don’t cry.Page 3: The lower half of Shoon’s face; his eyes are not visible. He's wearing the same clothing as in Suikoden V and appears to be the same age. One hand is rubbing at an eye while tears stream down his cheeks.Shoon: …I’m not crying…!?: *a hand reaches out towards him* It’s okay. Don’t cry.Shoon: *brushes away the hand* It’s not okay, damn it… *closeup of his hand, with tears on it* ...Damn it!Inner voice: Why?Page 4:Inner voice: Why do they do this?We’re worse than dogs. At least a dog knows that if it serves its master well, it will be treated well.We don’t know anything.*Shoon and Morgan crouched together in the gladiator dungeon. Shoon's back is to the viewer, but you can see he's still crying as he’s rubbing at his face. Morgan’s eyes are completely covered with bandages.Page 5: A very young Shoon and Morgan, both under ten years old, having a conversation.Shoon: *looking very cheerful* Are you new too? What’s your name? How old are you? Wow, you’re over a year younger than me!Morgan: *looks over his shoulder skeptically at Shoon* …I don’t understand. I’m a slave. Why did you become a gladiator?Page 6: Shoon looks down and taps his forefingers together shyly.Shoon: Well… My family is already poor, and my father’s been sick for a long time, so—Morgan: *with a comically shocked/dismayed expression* So they decided to sell you??Shoon: *looks up at him* No, I decided it. The money’ll really help them.Ah!! I heard someone say, kids like us won’t last long!!Morgan: … *looking at Shoon with an unimpressed “are you for real” expression*Shoon: *grabbing Morgan’s hand and raising it like a promise: We’re almost the same age, so we gotta stick together! *as he continues talking, Morgan gives him a slightly skeptical, but amused, smile* One day we’ll be the best gladiators in Stormfist!Page 7: Two-page spread of a large slave ship in the ocean.Page 8: Closeup of Shoon with a heavily bruised face, sitting against the wall in the gladiators’ dungeon, arms folded on his knees. As memories/echoes of words from others appear on the page, he slowly lowers his head and buries his face in his arms.?: Look at you.?: Why did you do that, kid??: Foolish.?: What did you think you could accomplish?Page 9: Waves lapping at a shore, overlaid with Shoon’s words from Suikoden V, when he tells the Prince and the Queen's Knights about a gladiator he knew.Shoon: Even after they put his eyes out, he was still too good. So they sold him off to some foreign country. They packed him on a ship, in a box, like livestock…*A pair of feet walk in the sand along the shore.*Page 10: A sequence of panels revealing Tir McDohl, the hero from Suikoden I, looking out to the sea as gulls float in the sky. He slowly turns to see Morgan, now an adult, standing at the shore, hair being blown by the wind, facing the direction of the sea.Tir: What is it, Morgan?Page 11: Illustration of Morgan and Shoon, ages about 12 and 14 (around/just before the timeframe of Suikoden V). Morgan’s eyes are not bandaged, and he’s sitting on the ground and looking back up at Shoon. Shoon is leaning over him, hands on his knees, and they are laughing and chatting. Overlaid is the same quote from the beginning, but translated into English.“Perhaps one day we will look back upon these things with joy. - Virgil, The Aeneid, Book I”[/READ-MORE]~15 years later, my commentary/critiques. [READ-MORE]"perhaps." holds up a little better for me after all these years than This Is How It Ends, which makes sense since I made it about four years later. You can see things I was doing in the other comic taken a little further here. It still plays with an overlay of narration and dialogue, plus multiple flashbacks and more than two settings this time. It's structurally more complex than This Is How It Ends.This was a fun project to design and assemble all these little booklets by hand, and I remember being very careful with the layout and pagination to make sure the ship as a big two page spread landed right in the middle of the booklet. I actually still have a couple of copies, though they are saddlestitched (with coloured staples!) instead of handsewn and don’t have the fancy translucent cover anymore. (I even made a little bonus card with an illustration of Shoon to go with it, and there were some additional author’s notes pages in the print version I haven’t posted here.)Looking at it today: The softness is nice and makes it dreamlike, but it also feels kind of flat - the tones are kind of middling-y everywhere, and combined with the sketchiness of the art it feels a bit weak, wishy-washy. Even just some image-editing to punch up the darkest lines and increase contrast would make it pop more, I think. My handwriting is (and continues to be) terrible. This is why I use fonts lol. (Hopefully more effectively than I used to.) Overall I think the structure, pacing, text of the story still works pretty well. I also think the paneling choices are pretty good. It’s not a bad balance of keeping things minimal and mixing up dialogue and flashbacks/thoughts to keep things moving forward/giving the reader enough guidance to assemble the narrative in their mind without getting too confusing. That said, today I’d rethink the placement of some of these speech bubbles, and probably plan it out so that they can actually be speech bubbles and not just floating words. I really like little Shoon and Morgan's expressions on pages 5 and 6, and I like the bottom three panels on page 8. According to my notes, the two-page spread of the ship was the hardest thing to draw. It was based on a cross between a Chinese merchant ship (a “junk”) and a Greek vessel, and apparently I also drew it going backwards by accident. But at least you can’t tell since it’s a static comic panel![/READ-MORE] For a slightly happier Shoon story, you can read These Unexpected Words. /self-promo