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 COMMENT EQUALITY
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Shadow – A magical
comic threshold
ByDo Huu Chi06/26/2021
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Reading time: 6 minutes

“Those talented, insightful and creative people are much more artistically
mature than I am. They break out of the established forms, create dozens of
new ways of drawing and exploit themes that have never been. Then their
works changed my life. They helped me understand that comics are a
language, a language with rules that you can and should break, that in that
language you can and should create new words, new syntaxes. . A language
can mean everything, as long as you put in the effort to think things through,
until you find a form, new or old, that suits what you want to express.
revealed — a language that doesn't want to fit into any framework."

Those passionate words of Cyril Pedrosa's humility – in a brief post on his

First Second Books blog – came back to me as vivid and compelling as ever,
as soon as I closed the last pages of the story. together ofShadow. I am
immediately reminded of Pedrosa because I introduced and analyzed his
Three Shadows in my first Storytelling class in Saigon 2013. This work
clearly made an impression. lighten upVu(who was still using the pen name
Bu Ren at the time) so much so that a few months later, Vu texted me, asking
me to read a script he wrote inspired by it. After that, after a long time, I
devoted myself to working on the Train, Vu enthusiastically did the
illustrations (including the picture book Going to the Garden to Pick up the
Sun published by Toa Train), time passed like a dog running in the field, all
of a sudden. At the beginning of this year, Vu told me that I was going to
release a book called Ball that I would send you to read.
I was so surprised and emotional. I even forgot about Vu asking me what
year the script was. Eight years of conceiving a story, three years of quietly
working every day to create more than 1,000 pages of stories, with the acute
realization that I draw for myself first – draw and tell the story I want to read
– not use to entertain or please anyone out there, which is already a huge
accomplishment. This is perhaps better understood by creatives in general,
and illustrators/comicists in particular. For the time being, let us temporarily
consider that patience and diligence as a kind of naturally born gifts, or a
strange genetic mutations, which is only one in about 9 million Vietnamese
possesses, so that we can stop beating around the bush, get into the magic and
creativity of Bóng.

From the very first page of Bóng, you already know you have entered a
whole new reality. Painter has done this by refreshing everything. From
drawing style to drawing materials, from the choosen perspective to the
outline of the frames, from the designs to the personalities of the character,
from the dialogues to wordless storytelling, you know you've never seen it
before. something similar in any other Vietnamese comic book. Of course, if
you had read Three Shadows, you would see its influence from it. If you had
read 20th Century Boys or known about Moebius, or watched a lot of
European and American cartoons, you would definitely recognize certain
similarities. And – this is important – those are digested similarities. Artists
do no simply copy the styles of the masters, but rather they use those styles
careful . The things collected during the study of masterful works have been
transformed by Vu into his own "voice". This "voice", being "spoken" with
all the enthusiasm of the author, inevitably has a few places too enthusiastic
or too immersed which will make it a bit difficult for the audience/readers to
"hear", but basically, It's a fresh, engaging, engaging narrative.

“Running out of things to draw here, are you planning on moving on?” Her
character's question was answered with just a finger. The character Ne points
to the direction his shadow is falling. Moving on, of course! The artist wants
to go to the end of the unknown - "if you don't know, you can't stop". And Ne
– and Vu himself – has really pushed the limits of all he knows. True to
Pedrosa's words: Vu has understood that comics are a vast and magical
language, and with all his limitations, he wants to explore all the uncharted
territories in that language.
Of course, any language is also influenced by cultural context. Comics
introduced into Vietnam from the beginning have always been considered as
a form of entertainment, even for children. Comic language combined with
Vietnamese culture has created a sketchy, sloppy, silly hybrid language-
language. Vu clearly doesn't want to use that language anymore. He used all
his success to use a language rich, rich, emotional and full of symbolism. Of
course, he wasn't always successful. As with any linguistic experiment, at the
boundary between the known and the unknown, there are always difficult
points to communicate. But anyone who sticks to those dim areas and forgets
to enjoy the wonderful brightness of most of the rest, is deeply regretful.

In Ball, there is abundance, abundance, and abundance of one thing -

something that has been missing for a long time in Vietnam, in the language
of comics in particular, and in other creative industries in general - that is
imagination. statue. In that world, people dress in a different way, speak in a
different way, eat fruit from other trees, live in different houses. The entire
space-time created by the author is strange and incredibly fascinating - not
without leaving a trace of efforts. But my goodness, embrace all these
wondrous creations the way you would listen to a babbler learning to speak,
or look at the early scribbles, not with a judgment of right and wrong, but
with an open heart and boundless gratitude for the creativity unfolding before
your eyes.

And then when you overcome all the visual fascination, the strange linguistic
surfaces, to sink below the flow of the message, of the thought, what does the
Shadow tell you about? Again, things that are rarely said: about the creative
journey, about the beauty of everyday life, about the struggle between a
comfortable life and the destruction of the earth, about the desire to return to
the innocent and poetic primitives. dream, and about – my God – my own
journey of inner discovery, going deep into my being, winning and losing,
wrong and right, laughing and crying, to get stronger, to grow, to move
forward chemical. Tell me, when was the last time you read a Vietnamese
comic – or whatever is commonly referred to as “creative” or “artistic” – with
such a theme?
“As far as I can see, there are good comics and bad comics, ambitious comics
and mediocre comics, small stories, thick stories, big stories, Japanese stories,
Korean stories, Belgian stories or American stories. They can be lots of pages
or just a few pages, color or just black and white, pen or collage, hand or
machine drawn or whatever. But they all speak the same language, a
language so subtle that a portion of the readers will always stand outside the
threshold of those books and never see the jewels within. " – Cyril Pedrosa
ended his essay thus. With his work, Vu created a beautiful door. Your job,
dear reader, is toOrder yourself a set of Vu's books now!, and try to step your
foot across that magical threshold.