Comics Artopsy #7

Foreign body detection - Part 1

Hi everyone,

For this month’s Artopsy, I’m inviting you to dive into the world of Fang, a graphic novel series I’m currently doing with writer an co-creator Joe Kelly.

At the moment, there’s only one French album available, published by Humanoids. We’re planning to do a series of albums where each book is a one-shot, self-contained story. Each of these albums can be read independently, but the whole series will form one epic saga.

For those interested, the books will eventually be available in English, in two volumes (meaning every time we have two French albums published, we will print one English graphic novel containing both of those French books).

The original idea for this project came to me more than 15 years ago. At the time, I got very interested in traditional Asian painting and literature. There’s something both fascinating and somehow inaccessible to me about Asian literature, since it seems to have grown in its own bubble, not influenced by occidental-specific types of storytelling like Greek tragedies or Shakespeare’s plays.

My original intention was to literally adapt part of a Chinese novel, but I quickly realized the task was too complicated and, since I wasn’t knowledgeable enough in that domain, I feared that my attempt would result in a weak reinterpretation of the original material. So I ended up just keeping the theme of “demon hunting,” which is omnipresent in Asian literature, and built up something of my own over it.

I wanted to do a story that mixed walking/talking animals along with regular human characters. That kind of universe is a little weird to comprehend but I imagined that if it was displayed with conviction, it would seem legit. My main character was a monkey who eventually got a pangolin sidekick.

When publishing Pride of Bagdad, I realized that there’s something intriguing about the phenomenon that makes readers/spectators highly empathic of animals or animal characters, and I wanted to play with that again. And also, the below painting proves that humans and animals use to live together a long time ago, right?

Here’s some material from many early versions of the Fang story.

[Goddamn, these pages are breathtaking! BKV here, interrupting your regularly scheduled Artopsy to let you know that there’s MUCH more spectacular art after the below paywall, including layouts for a wild fight scene between a monkey and a dozen imperial guards. Plus, an exclusive opportunity for one of you lucky Tower members to win a copy of that first Humanoids Fang album SIGNED by the great Niko Henrichon. So if you’re not already a paid subscriber to Exploding Giraffe, thanks for considering becoming one today. Either way, we’ll see you back here on Monday for a few more free pages of Spectators. Thanks again, and have a great weekend!]