Floating Lantern Festival

A new autobio comic about Thailand! 🏮🇹🇭

Postscript: For someone who has been drawing nonfiction comics a long time, I’m still fairly new at drawing myself and telling stories from my own life. I went to college for journalism, and it’s fairly ingrained in my psyche that other people’s stories are more worth focusing on than mine. However, some of my favorite nonfiction comics feature their author, and I think it can really add something, so now I’m trying out memoir, or “autobio,” in a way I haven’t before.

I wrote a first draft of this the way I’m used to doing, as a journalism comic, but it was really flat and a little boring. So rather than sticking to the details of the literal truth, I rewrote it in a way that favors the emotional truth of the experience, but not exactly as it actually happened. For example: we went to this festival with two friends, Matt and Rosie, a lovely couple from the UK we met while traveling in Malaysia.

Matt, Rosie, and Alli (you know, from the comic)

But the comic was just too complicated with four characters. And beyond that, the character at the end of the piece is invented. She’s based on a story that Matt and Rosie heard at their hostel. All this stuff happened, and this is what it felt like to us, but it’s rearranged for the sake of the comic. In my journalist’s heart, it feels like lying! But, this is memoir, and I wanted to really try and commit. I’m happy with the result, especially the cartooning, and I have more like this that I’m starting to work on now.

We’re in the Philippines, our last stop in “Southeast” Asia, and we’re heading to Taiwan soon. After that we’ll go to Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan, wrapping up in late July or early August.

–Josh