Photography courtesy of Sonny Liew.
Comics are fun, but if one is to make a career of it, one needs luck and lots of talent. And one needs to take bold initiatives and to experiment. A very adult way to stay young, really.
In Seremban, a young Sonny Liew stumbled across an issue of the British anthology comic series, 2000AD. “My mind was blown,” he said. “They did a weekly magazine with like five stories in there, and every artist had a different style.” After sustaining himself for years on a steady diet of Marvel and Lao Fu Zi comics which featured a very consistent art style, the sheer eclectic variety in 2000AD introduced Liew to a world of new possibilities.
Fast forward to 2014, and Liew can count himself among those unique talents he once admired. His quirky, sketchy style first gained widespread attention with My Faith in Frankie1, a supernatural romantic comedy with British writer Mike Carey about a girl and her own personal deity. Since then he’s illustrated a wide variety of stories, from comic adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility to Spider-Man to a biography of Singaporean painter Georgette Chen. His most recent published work is The Shadow Hero2, written by Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese, Avatar), a graphic novel set in the 1940s about the first Asian-American superhero.
