COMICS

“Mis­sion­ary” has been pub­lished
in the June 2008 issue of Aether: The Jour­nal of Media Geog­ra­phy.

Down­load Han — “Mis­sion­ary” (PDF, 1.9 MB)

My comics made it into the 24 Hour Comis Day High­lights 2006 book!
They chose only 10 out of more than a thou­sand entries,
so it’s quite an (unex­pected) honor. ;-)

Inter­ested in more? Down­load Inci­dents of Travel,
ear­lier work pub­lished in Q & A: Queer in Asian Amer­ica in 1998 (PDF, 1 MB)

For 24 straight hours (10 AM on Sat­ur­day, Octo­ber 7th to 10 AM on Sun­day, Octo­ber 8th, 2006), I wrote, drew, and inked 24 pages of comics.

The idea behind the inter­na­tional 24 Hour Comics Day was to pro­duce 24 pages of comics in 24 hours. Non-stop, no sleep, and it’s no joke. It was appar­ently held at 89 loca­tions in 17 coun­tries. I was at Elf­sar Comics in the Yale­town area of Van­cou­ver with about 15 other folks. All boys (ahem, some men) except for me and one high school girl.

It was sur­real — through­out the day, some­one would blurt out ques­tions like, “How should I kill off this dog I just drew?” and sug­ges­tions would be made. And there was a steady stream of moms and wives and girl­friends drop­ping by with home­made cook­ies and cof­fee and what not. I just wore my Ety­motic ER•6 ear­phones to block it all out. And I just drew, and drew, and drew.

Elfsar24HourComics.jpg
It was tough! By the 18th hour, my hand was frozen solid in the pencil-holding posi­tion, and my neck was stuck in a per­ma­nent forward-tilt for a few days after­wards. It took a while to recover phys­i­cally from the ordeal, but the good thing is that I now have an illus­trated ver­sion of my PhD dis­ser­ta­tion. Yup, we could draw what­ever topic or story we want, but the nerd that I am, I decided to dis­till my dissertation-in-progress into 24 pages of comics. Lucky for those of you who will never read all 1000 pages of the dis­ser­ta­tion man­u­script (if I ever fin­ish it), you can now read the comics version.

Dis­claimer: Again, I wrote, drew, and inked the whole thing in 24 hours. The draw­ings are sim­ple and unso­phis­ti­cated, and full of talk­ing heads. There are lots of things I would edit and re-draw, if I could. So be gen­tle, and please read with a gen­er­ous heart. And let me know what you think.

Click on the image on each page, and it will flip to the next page. Or down­load the whole thing at once as a PDF file (Han2008_missionary.pdf, 1.9 MB).

Han_Missionary01_detail.jpg
Start Page 01

Printed from: http://www.judyhan.com/otherwise/?page_id=279 .
© by J. Han 2012.

20 Comments   »

  • ewee says:
    19.10.06 at 16:12

    LOVE IT. will post more when i have the time/mental bandwidth…

    Reply
  • TomH says:
    20.10.06 at 17:11

    Thanks, Judy! Great work! Truly scary.

    Reply
  • Yong Soon says:
    21.10.06 at 17:41

    Bravo!!! Illu­mi­nat­ing and fun to read. Spot on in your cri­tique of the pol­i­tics and the geopo­lit­i­cal imag­i­nary behind this mon­strous move­ment. Also hits close to home — sev­eral of my cousins in So Cal and in Korea are quite fer­vent and have gone of some mis­sions and are always try­ing to con­vert me, the god­less hea­then in their midst.…Thanks for mak­ing this impor­tant work accessible.

    Reply
  • chris says:
    22.10.06 at 14:36

    judy — this is truly inspir­ing, not to men­tion a very unique medium for trans­lat­ing your work. thanks for the peek at your 1000-page baby. hope all is well oth­er­wise in your reset­tle­ment in canada.

    Reply
  • Hope says:
    23.10.06 at 12:48

    what a cre­ative, men­tal, and mostly, phys­i­cal feat. i’m guess­ing this project was help­ful in orga­niz­ing the many loose ends as well as the big, and small, ideas that com­prise your dis­ser­ta­tion. i see how each of the three big points, us-korea alliance, us hege­mony, and korean dias­pora, are impor­tant fac­tors when look­ing at the world­wide evan­ge­liz­ing efforts led by the us, who also hap­pens to be lead­ing the efforts in trans­form­ing the rest of the world into cap­i­tal­ist democ­ra­cies (at least in the­ory). there­fore, after read­ing your comic book, i can’t help but think that the us polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary cam­paign in korea dur­ing the cold war has been hugely suc­cess­ful in gal­vanz­ing the kore­ans for the chris­t­ian, cap­i­tal­ist mis­sions. not sur­pris­ingly, the lines between polit­i­cal econ­omy, mil­i­tary and reli­gion are blurred. but what is pecu­liar is the degree of the korean evan­gel­i­cal fer­vor. now that this topic is on my mind, i hope you share your con­clu­sions when you reach them, prefer­ably, in the same comic-book format.

    Reply
  • JDL says:
    23.10.06 at 22:31

    That’s bril­liant! For­get the diss, fin­ish the comic book and hand that in.

    Reply
  • dotori says:
    23.10.06 at 22:49

    Thanks for all the kudos, guys! I WISH I could for­get about the dis­ser­ta­tion — ha! I AM seri­ously con­sid­er­ing sub­mit­ting a por­tion of the diss in comic book form, though.

    Reply
  • Je Yon says:
    25.10.06 at 09:51

    Judy–

    This is so great! I now feel that when I am try­ing to explain your dis­ser­ta­tion to peo­ple, I can say some­thing a lit­tle bit more than “some­thing about korean mis­sion­ar­ies and evan­gel­i­cals and their ties to the US.” I am look­ing for­ward to read­ing your 1000 page plus dis­ser­ta­tion when you are done. I am truly intrigued by this topic and the comic strip is a great dis­til­la­tion for those of us who are inca­pable and/or unwill­ing to spend the hun­dreds of hours that you have ded­i­cated to this com­plex issue.

    I am await­ing your con­clu­sions with bated breath. Now that I don’t have the finales of project run­way or Fla­vor Flav to look for­ward to, I am thank­ful for some­thing more mean­ing­ful to anticipate!

    Je Yon

    Reply
  • Leigh says:
    16.11.06 at 10:52

    Judy–
    I’m so glad I finally read this! It’s great. My favorite draw­ing has got to be your “Not Geol­ogy” T-shirt :-)
    Give the dogs hugs!
    Leigh

    Reply
  • ewee says:
    21.11.06 at 13:19

    heya — still just a quick note, tho i’ve read it more care­fully and love it — but why, if you’re so anti­so­cial, would you go out into pub­lic (a very fan­boy pub­lic, i might add) and draw it? i think the anti­so­cial thing is a front.

    –ewee

    Reply
  • dotorious says:
    24.11.06 at 13:30

    Yeah, what­ever, ewee. :-)

    But that was the whole point — draw­ing comics together in a pub­lic setting!

    Reply
  • ewee says:
    27.11.06 at 11:17

    uh, i thought the idea was to make us get off our col­lec­tive asses and draw? what­ever. woohoo you!

    (and a front for your scin­til­lat­ing social out­go­ing side)

    Reply
  • hh says:
    01.01.07 at 21:46

    thanks for this great comic-book art. it hit on so many inter­est­ing axes: impe­ri­al­ism, reli­gion, korean dias­pora. con­grats on hav­ing it pub­lished. i learned so much. it helped me bet­ter under­stand my ances­try and cur­rent day activities.

    Reply
  • Ulysses says:
    05.06.07 at 16:06

    The dis­ser­ta­tion as comic idea is won­der­ful.
    I’m jeal­ous, though it sounds like it was pretty tax­ing, phys­i­cally. It sounds (and looks) like you had drawn comics a few times before. I am curi­ous about what was involved. Like what size of paper did you draw on? Did you draw in pen­cil and then fol­low with ink?
    Any­way, I’m a total fan. I am won­der­ing what I could turn into a comic, myself. Maybe that’s obvi­ous.
    –Ulysses

    Reply
  • dotorious Judy says:
    05.06.07 at 23:40

    Thanks, Ulysses! It was really exhaust­ing, so I’ve begun train­ing in hopes of being in bet­ter shape at this year’s event in Octo­ber 2007. Ha ha. And yes, I’ve been draw­ing comics for a very long time, but never seri­ously enough. You should do it in the Bay Area, too! You could eas­ily do one about being mar­ried to a dis­ser­tat­ing PhD stu­dent… or per­haps some­thing more inter­est­ing. ;-)

    Every­body used their own, dif­fer­ent setup, but I used these Blue Line Comic Book Art Board (11×17) that I just trimmed in half. I had bought them almost 5 years ago, so I just wanted to get rid of them. I orig­i­nally wanted to draw at 11×17 size, but that would have taken longer. Because of the time con­straints, it looked like most every­one used let­ter size (8.5×11) paper. There was one guy who brought a whole com­puter and scan­ner set up, another guy who actu­ally drew on the com­puter, and a cou­ple of oth­ers brought desk­top draw­ing boards, too.

    And yes, I did rough sketches first in pen­cil, using both reg­u­lar and non-reproducing blue pen­cils, and drew over them with var­i­ous sizes of Pigma Micron pens. These pens pro­vide non-varying-in-width, kinda bor­ing lines, but per­form reli­ably under duress. I didn’t fol­low the pen­cil­ing all that duti­fully when I was ink­ing, so I did have quite a bit of eras­ing to do at the end.

    This year, I’m think­ing of using these dip pens that I recently bought for a graphic nov­els class. I only have the Speed­ball Car­toon­ing Pen Set with 6 nibs, but I’ll prob­a­bly exper­i­ment with more. These guys took some get­ting used to, but the lines are richer and more inter­est­ing. I might skip the pen­cil­ing this time, too.

    Reply
  • emily says:
    10.06.07 at 18:06

    fuck­ing bril­liant! love the dis­ser­ta­tion in comic for­mat. for the pur­poses of read­abil­ity and reach­ing a wider audi­ence, the comic does that amaz­ingly well. i stum­bled onto your page while search­ing for queer korean pages, and if i remem­ber cor­rectly, i think i met you dur­ing a KASCON in seat­tle? i was a jaded con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pant that talked to you after some workshop/presentation/whatever. twas nice to meet you, hope things are well, good luck with the dis­ser­ta­tion. my brother is ABD also, i some­what remotely feel your pain.

    Reply
  • dotorious Judy says:
    19.06.07 at 18:31

    By the way, speak­ing of food, we arrived in Korea last night. I’ll write more about this later, but we’re stay­ing at a guest house attached to a col­lege dor­mi­tory, and we had the PERFECT break­fast at the col­lege cafe­te­ria down­stairs this morn­ing. We went for a jog at 6 AM, show­ered, and by 7:30, we were sit­ting down with rice, radish soup, excel­lent kim­chi, deli­cious sesame leaf ban­chan, and a per­fect, non-greasy white fish fil­let, lightly bat­tered and pan-fried. Fin­ished with a lit­tle juice box of soy milk. Yum! Sim­ple, tasty, and cheap at about $1.50 each.

    I was nearly in tears of joy… what would Jamie Oliver think of THIS school lunch?

    Reply
  • sunny says:
    12.01.09 at 03:16

    hullo! steph lee pointed me to your page and I must say that I’m quite glad that they did! I’m just won­der­ing whether you had fleshed out the comic more, how the diss is going, etc. see­ing as how this was orig­i­nally posted 2+ years ago! at any rate, thanks for shar­ing this with the interwebs…

    Reply
  • Joan says:
    12.01.09 at 14:01

    Wow, cool! I can’t believe you still have this web­site! Mis­sion­ary, hmm. So full of…possible mean­ings. Hehe!

    Reply
  • Sara says:
    11.06.09 at 20:48

    Judy, Con­grat­u­la­tions. That is a great work and a very inspir­ing idea :)

    Reply

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  5. PhD dissertation in comic format « Culture Matters
  6. Turning 1000 text-pages into a 24-page comic book
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