oozey mess
Product Placement
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
YOU ARE THE REASON
d e v o n
Andulka
Sade Olutola
Misplaced Lens Cap
Not today Justin
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Show & Tell
izzy's playlists!
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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if i look back, i am lost
@theartofmadeline
hello vonnie
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@plaest2k
[she/her]
Sloane Hong is a comic artist, illustrator and tattooer, rumoured to lurk somewhere deep within the agonising, suburban sprawl of Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa.
portfolio: https://plaest2k.xyz
itch.io (digital comics store): https://plaest2k.itch.io
patreon: http://patreon.com/plaest2k
ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/plaest2k
bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/plaest2k.bsky.social
twitter: https://twitter.com/plaest2k
email: [email protected]
hey hey, if you missed it in October, have no fear; my horny, cronenbergian, lesbian, sci-fi, body horror comic, Expiry Date, is now available on my itch dot io! ✨🫁💃🏻🫁✨ 🔗
plaest2k.itch.io/expirydate
When your life consists of nothing but ceaseless work and tedium, calling the number you found next to your neighbour's mutilated corpse starts to sound like a really good idea...
Getting off? More like getting offed, amirite??
Available now on itch.io
this is absolutely completely insane. what if David Cronenberg was a transsexual dyke who grew up reading ero-guro. this comic will fuck you (up)
-Doctor Emmy Rākete
When your life consists of nothing but ceaseless work and tedium, calling the number you found next to your neighbour's mutilated corpse starts to sound like a really good idea...
Getting off? More like getting offed, amirite??
Available now on itch.io
this is absolutely completely insane. what if David Cronenberg was a transsexual dyke who grew up reading ero-guro. this comic will fuck you (up)
-Doctor Emmy Rākete
Marrow is a sci-fi/ body-horror comic about two idiots having a totally normal time fucking around in a place euphemistically named "The Farm." Come check it out! :)
If you picked it up at the ShortBox Comics Fair, you can find a code at the back of the PDF to download this higher-resolution version + pick up my previous comic, Faster Than Light: The Nagarjuna, Part 1!
hey hey, if you missed it in October, have no fear; my horny, cronenbergian, lesbian, sci-fi, body horror comic, Expiry Date, is now available on my itch dot io! ✨🫁💃🏻🫁✨ 🔗
plaest2k.itch.io/expirydate
hey, im a young nz artist too and i like making comics/want to do something bigger when im older, and i think your stuff is genuinely so fucking cool. i love it so much. i was wondering how you pursued art after highschool, like did you go to art school? if so, where and what was that like, and if not, how’d you find the time to continue doing it? its always felt like my opportunities for a career in art specifically seem smaller living in nz, but idk your stuff inspires me to think otherwise. thank you :)
kia ora!!
thanks so much for asking, it's truly so flattering that a young nz artist would ask me for advice! <3 sadly i might not necessarily be the best person to ask...
First of all, it's been a loooooong time since i've been a young artist hahaha I'm 32. After high school, I studied architecture at university because, as you're probably aware, we don't really have art schools like our peers do overseas. But after studying for a few years, I had a major depressive episode and dropped out. After that, I ran away to Korea to teach english for a year before coming back to work in cafes for about 6 years. Back then I was pursuing a career in editorial illustration cause that's what all my favourite artists were doing but I didn't realise that it was a dying industry at the time and there weren't exactly lot of full-time professional artists here who could have warned me...
So after about 10 years of trying to piece together some kind of profession in illustration, I ended up looking for a tattoo apprenticeship which was looking pretty promising but my bosses turned out to be not-so-great people. I tried to keep tattooing on my own but that was around the time COVID hit which wasn't (and still isn't) great for a job that requires you meet face-to-face with a lot of people. So, since the pandemic began, I've just been subsisting off of jobseeker, chipping away at comics and the occasional illustration gig.
The whole experience had me perpetually burnt out for the past ~15 years and made me realise that art as a career really just shouldn't be a thing. Under capitalism, it requires either an embarrassing level of compromise, privilege or luck to pursue. All the household-name artists you know in NZ either come from privilege or got unbelievably lucky. I don't say this as a value judgment or anything, most of them are truly wonderful people, it's just what I've learned about them as colleagues who've worked together a few times over the years.
I don't fault anyone for wanting to pursue that, but if you want to make uncompromising art that makes you feel fulfilled, you can't stake your livelihood on it. Art is supposed to be a by-product of life well lived, not content to be sold.
It's why I'm making plans to go back to uni next year to switch careers into a cushy office job because, as you've observed, even if you still want to pursue this as a full-time career, opportunities for artists in Aotearoa is extremely limited.
Having said all that, there's still a lot of nuance to this whole thing that would take me too long to cover in a tumblr post, so if you'd like me to elaborate or anything or have more questions, you're more than welcome to contact me through my email: [email protected]!
And this offer extends to literally anyone who might be looking for advice or just wants to talk about art <3
Final thing: the thought of studying something else at college/ university and keeping your art as a hobby might sound bleak when you're young, but life is so much longer than you think. You might feel like you have limitless creativity and ideas at the moment but when it becomes your entire life, you burn through it all faster than you'd think. It's because you need fuel to inform what you make and you can't get that from just making art. Like I always say, art is a by-product of a life well lived; You need life-experiences; You need to love, hate, care, be hated and loved to make art and you can't do that if you're too busy to do any of that. Those 3 years you spend on a bachelors is nothing in comparison to a lifetime of staring at a blank page, agonizing over what to make next.
as an apology for not posting enough here on tumblr, please have some early character concepts for Expiry Date (available now on itch.io) <3
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!
NOTE: The Cartoonist Cooperative is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way formally connected with ShortBox.
Today’s spotlight is Sloane Hong ( @plaest2k ) and their new comic for ShortBox, Expiry Date.
We’d 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), I’m a Korean-tauiwi illustrator, comic artist and tattooer based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I only started making comics professionally about five years ago but they’ve 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, it’s also about transness, labour rights, our relationship with our bodies and death under capitalism, etc but it’s mostly about shitty jobs.
My friend described it as “what if David Cronenberg was a transsexual dyke who grew up reading ero-guro”.
What are some early experiences as a cartoonist that shaped you or your process?
SH: My brother’s 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 I’d sneak into his room to admire his drawings and read his comics. He had most of the usual stuff you’d find on any Korean kid’s shelf in the 90’s: 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 it’s not just that I had someone to introduce me to all this stuff, it’s the fact I’m 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.
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. “Are 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?” 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. It’s 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 it–maybe if I just jump into a comic with nothing but a stupid premise, no planning and an impending deadline, I won’t 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 I’d 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 isn’t something you really set out to do, it’s something that just happens. You don’t practice drawing to get better at drawing; you do it to better channel your voice. It’s only when you can stop thinking about how to move your hand that your heart can take the lead.
I’d 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 I’d 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.
Mostly.
Read the rest of the interview HERE! And dont forget to check out the Shortbox Comics Fair to support these lovely creators!!
Marrow is a sci-fi/ body-horror comic about two idiots having a totally normal time fucking around in a place euphemistically named "The Farm." Come check it out! :)
If you picked it up at the ShortBox Comics Fair, you can find a code at the back of the PDF to download this higher-resolution version + pick up my previous comic, Faster Than Light: The Nagarjuna, Part 1!
Maar the bard....
Maard.....
good times
Heya folks, I don't think I ever mentioned it here but if you like my work and wanna help me keep making more art, please consider joining my Patreon!
You can get access to literally everything I've ever posted for just $1/month, such as time-lapse videos of my illustrations and sketches I don't post elsewhere. At the moment, I'm sharing some process pics for the comic I'm currently working on for the Shortbox Comics Fair this coming October, which includes pencils and a look at the 3d models I make in Blender for these kinda projects.
I don't exactly make a lot (any) money so every little bit is Hugely Appreciated!
Patreon is empowering a new generation of creators. Support and engage with artists and creators as they live out their passions!
style test
dog girl
I had the pleasure of illustrating the cover for Indiepocalypse, issue #38; ten hot indie games created by 10 hot indie devs, curated by @pizzapranks, available now!
Issue #38 of a curated monthly alternative game anthology collecting games from 10 developers.
My team and I so excited to finally launch THE CARTOONIST COOPERATIVE, a community-based organization meant to help comics-makers sustain themselves through shared promotion, educationals resource, skill trades, and career assistance! Anyone making comics, is invited to be a member, including artists, writers, colorists, and letterers.
Not a cartoonist but want to be involved in supporting the Cooperative? Then we invite you to become a volunteer! With access to our private Discord and forum, you’ll be able to help cartoonists create and promote their work 🖋️
Please peruse the start of our curated comics catalogue, where you can find comics of all genres. Graphic novels, minicomics & webcomics are spread across too many platforms, making it hard for readers to find work they love. We want to centralize it all! Check out our beautiful website below:
✨cartoonist.coop✨
