ShortBox Comics Member Interview: Sloane Hong
Throughout the month of October, the Cartoonist Cooperative will be sharing interviews with members of the Co-op who have a new comic available at the ShortBox Comics Fair 2024!Â
NOTE: The Cartoonist Cooperative is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way formally connected with ShortBox. Â
Todayâs spotlight is Sloane Hong ( @plaest2k ) and their new comic for ShortBox, Expiry Date.
Weâd love it if you could introduce yourself and tell us about your background in comics.
Sloane Hong: Kia ora, my name is Sloane Hong (she/her), Iâm a Korean-tauiwi illustrator, comic artist and tattooer based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I only started making comics professionally about five years ago but theyâve always been a significant part of my life for as long as I can remember.
Tell us more about your new comic?
SH: Expiry Date is an erotic, body horror, sci-fi short story about coming home from a long day at your shitty, minimum-wage job, crashing on your couch and fantasizing about how fucking good it would feel to just die.
I mean, itâs also about transness, labour rights, our relationship with our bodies and death under capitalism, etc but itâs mostly about shitty jobs.
My friend described it as âwhat if David Cronenberg was a transsexual dyke who grew up reading ero-guroâ.
What are some early experiences as a cartoonist that shaped you or your process?
SH: My brotherâs also an artist, probably better than I could ever be, and I basically owe any good taste I might have to him. Growing up, I always got home from school first so Iâd sneak into his room to admire his drawings and read his comics. He had most of the usual stuff youâd find on any Korean kidâs shelf in the 90âs: Akira Toriyama, Masamune Shirow, Yoshito Usui, etc, and a couple of Korean manhwa that are all now damn-near impossible to find. As he got older, he started getting into American comics and brought home stuff like R. Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Fletcher Hanks, etc from the library.
But itâs not just that I had someone to introduce me to all this stuff, itâs the fact Iâm six years younger than him and he was already reading this stuff earlier than most. So I think I started looking at all those misanthropic underground comics by horny white men when I was, like, what⌠about 10 years old?
Besides my brother, the trauma of working shitty jobs for years on end, The Terrible Boredom of Paradise, and this weird and fucked up miracle we call life are probably the wellsprings of both my inspiration and ceaseless burnout.Â
Tell us about your creative process; how did you develop this comic and what are the steps you took to bring it to the final stage?
SH: I did something really stupid for the 2023 ShortBox Comics Fair. I have ADHD and one of the many ways it manifests is that I have a debilitating habit of overthinking my stories. âAre the themes too obvious? Is it too heavy handed? Are the motivations for this character clear enough? Is this the right way to phrase this? Is this the right word? Is this the right letter? Is this the right punctuation?â etc, etc.
On paper, it probably sounds like something every writer goes through but when I say debilitating, I mean interferes-with-my-ability-to-live-a-normal-life-kind of debilitating. Itâs kind of impossible to articulate how bad it was but it got to a point where I was so sick of myself and all the stories I never finished that I said fuck itâmaybe if I just jump into a comic with nothing but a stupid premise, no planning and an impending deadline, I wonât have time to think about all these inconsequential details. So I sat down and forced myself to write, pencil and ink a comic, page-by-page.
It was essentially an exercise in automatism: I was still thinking about draftsmanship, composition, flow and everything but I kinda just let the story tell itself by writing/ drawing whatever felt like a natural progression for the narrative.
That was how I ended up with Marrow, which was kinda funny because the whole point was to make a goofy, low-stakes comic about nothing to circumvent the pressure of having to write anything good. Instead Iâd inadvertently made something that was layered and deeply intimate and won the sci-fi category in the 2024 Minicomic Awards. But, more importantly, the whole process helped bring everything together. It reminded me of something I used to tell young artists: developing a style isnât something you really set out to do, itâs something that just happens. You donât practice drawing to get better at drawing; you do it to better channel your voice. Itâs only when you can stop thinking about how to move your hand that your heart can take the lead.
Iâd forgotten my own advice. I was so concerned about the technical details of how to write a story that I was basically assembling components rather than writing anything at all. Marrow helped me realize Iâd already internalized everything I needed to write long ago. I just needed to stop thinking.
Expiry Date was a continuation of that process and made in basically the same way. There was just significantly less stress involved now that I knew I could trust myself.
Read the rest of the interview HERE! And dont forget to check out the Shortbox Comics Fair to support these lovely creators!!
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
pixelskylines
stormborns
germansingergirl
origamiaround
kaledo-art
