On Making and Failing
A conversation with Charis Poon on Eric’s Sister

You said, when you first announced the existence of this graphic novel, “This project represents the stories I want to tell and how I see myself as a maker” — could you say more about why this is the story you want to tell at this moment in time and how it is a reflection of your personal journey as an artist?

In order to answer that fully, we’re going to have to go back to my graduation show from Wesleyan in 2017. It’s nostalgic to look back on this work and being an art student. Upon graduating, I felt as if I didn’t know how to situate myself within a hyper-capitalist, competitive industry where you’re understanding your work as objects adjacent to the asset-owning class, as “high-value objects”.

While I got a lot out of studying art, I couldn’t see myself fitting into that as a creator. One thing I liked about making exhibitions was the collaborative aspect of it. These are some of my dear college friends who helped me make my show, who I still speak to years after graduating.

In Eric’s Sister, I wanted to interrogate the myth of the solo male genius artist, who works alone and is deeply withdrawn and always looking inwards. Even though looking inwards is definitely part of the creative process, I don’t think it’s the entirety of it. I had to look back to this graduation project to ask myself, “why I do make art?” “Why am I moving back to Hong Kong?” and “M+ Museum is being built, and what’s the future of art here in this city?”

I started working at a non-profit art space on the curatorial team, where I was mainly organizing exhibitions, writing texts and giving tours. The exhibitions I worked on were largely of older male artists, and while there great things I learned from that, I also felt a kind of institutional heaviness about the question of “legacy” and the seriousness of certain kinds of art-making.

I made my way into the independent publishing scene in Hong Kong, when I started assisting the collective Zine Coop at various fairs and also helping distribute some of their publications. Some of you might be aware, zines are self-published little magazines, and they are a great way to not take making too seriously, and treat yourself as the publisher. Zines can help you think of yourself as someone with artistic agency.

One of the things I noticed in Hong Kong during the unrest in 2019 was this feeling of not having control over your life, feeling as if you’re a puppet whose strings are being pulled by someone else. Independent publishing is one of the last avenues to make yourself heard in a completely uncensored, unfiltered way.

In terms of how this all relates to Eric’s Sister, I’ll need to give a little plot summary. It’s about two siblings, Lisa and Eric. Eric is a painter poised on a career breakthrough and showing at a commercial gallery. However, he’s internally suffering because he doesn't feel he can live up to being the firstborn son of his family. The main character is Eric’s sister, Lisa, who sees Eric as a superstar and feels she can’t measure up to him. They love and care about each other but they can’t really perceive each other’s feelings of inadequacy and inner turmoil. That kind of doubt looms pretty large in my own creative process.

When I read about the tragic suicide of the painter Matthew Wong in 2019, and the subsequent drastic ascent of the commercial market around his work, it made me think about society’s over-valuation of the artist’s output or oeuvre, which seems to take precedent over showing concern for artists’ wellbeing. Or even their financial stability, especially during the difficult periods. There’s so much of an emphasis on ‘making it’, with phrases like “make or break your career”, are you going to “make it” by thirty, are you on a list of people who are under a certain age?

These notions frame your success as being contingent on things that are entirely out of your control, and I really resented that. I wanted to make a book about artists living in the difference between how they present at their exhibition openings versus how they’re struggling in the studio. The tension and dissonance between your public persona and your inner darkness. As a maker myself, I was struggling a bit with that in the past few years. A self-published graphic novel seemed like the best way to address these ideas.

The characters in your graphic novel are almost all artists and creative people in many different stages and roles within the creative field (including gallery owners, art fair organizers, professors, poets, architects, etc.). While writing these characters and describing this landscape of creative work, did you work through some of your thoughts and feelings about Hong Kong’s creative landscape? Were there any revelations?

In the book we have Lisa’s dearest friend Wing, who is a poet, but also a copy editor and translator on the side. There’s also the aspiring architect Adi, who becomes fast friends with Lisa after taking her under his wing, as he notices on the first day of class she’s an outcast. We also get to know David, Eric’s one-time gallerist.

I wanted to show that in the most intimate creative friendships, or friendships between artists and cultural workers, there is room to admit not just vulnerability but the scariest thoughts, like “I think I need to quit, I’m not sure if I can do this, maybe I’m not good enough to make it, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

The characters struggle to relate to each other when they’re performing a smooth, easy experience of life as a line of successes. They start to understand each other more when they realize they have similar doubts.

In one of the early conversations between Lisa and Adi, Adi confides in Lisa as a first generation college student, and he doesn't really see himself in the architecture field. He’s South Asian, and doesn't feel in Hong Kong that there’s a lot of understanding for his cultural and class context in the industry.

In casting Lisa’s friends as fellow aspiring creative workers, I wanted to make space to show that behind the glamorous appearance of artmaking, there is messiness.

I wanted the book to show moments after the party, after the champagne reception, after your debut show, there’s a real emptiness or void to confront.

In early drafts, I demonized the gallerist character, because it’s lazy and easy to traffic in false binaries of commercial workers as evil and non-profit workers as saintly. I also originally wrote Lisa and Eric’s father Lawrence as a kind of tiger father figure. But in the end, those characters are portrayed empathetically, because they are living in the same capitalist city as Eric and Lisa, and have ends to meet, and their own hopes and fears.

Some of you may have been reading Eric’s Sister online as a webcomic. Why did you decide to release Eric’s Sister as a weekly serial webcomic on Instagram and your website, rather than launch it as a self-published novel? Did this choice wind up changing your storytelling or lead to revisions because of people’s reactions and feedback?

In traditional publishing, which I am familiar with through past experiences and friends who are authors, the book is somewhat of a private project between the creator, their editor, and maybe their agent and a few trusted first readers. I understand and respect that this as a very involved process that often takes many years. 

The fun thing about the webcomic is that most of my readers already know my work from digital platforms like social media or online magazines. I wanted the webcomic to feel like the e-equivalent of getting a zine in your mailbox every week, except without having to use so much paper (at least until releasing the print book!)

Most of us in this room probably most feverishly read webcomics in the early 2000s, like Cyanide and Happiness, and excitedly watched images load laggily on our dial up networks before Wi-Fi. There’s an anticipation there.

I also think publishing often prioritizes people with longer attention spans, versus some people who just want to read for five to ten minutes at a time. People confided in me that they read the webcomic in the bathroom, or on their lunch break, or on public transport. There’s something affirming about having a story you made accompany a stranger.

What does self publishing mean to you rather than working with a publisher? In what ways, if any, do you think this route was harder? Why was this the right choice for Eric’s Sister in particular?

I have so much respect for traditional publishing and everyone who works in that industry and system. It’s a complex thing that’s often a labor of love.

Additionally, I think of self-publishing as a real privilege and treat. The fact all of you showed up today means there is a devoted readership of indie literary projects. There isn’t necessarily a stigma, but there is a negative way of seeing self-publishing as: “no one picked you so you had to pick yourself.” But I feel you can also see that as: in choosing yourself, you only need to answer to yourself. This book was copyedited by Karen Cheung, and I was mentored by the amazing Sophie Yanow. The thrust of it though, was quite internal and personal.

For me, after years of collaborating with great editors and also illustration clients, I wanted to stake out a bit of a quiet corner to make my own world in, without too much outside input. You can have your own book printed after drawing it by hand for many months over many drafts. There’s something DIY and punk about going that route.

In terms of inspirations, Sophie Yanow’s The Contradictions, published by Drawn and Quarterly, which I love, started as a webcomic. I also loved Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve zines which he self-published in California.

Regarding feedback from readers, some of them noted towards the middle of the book, the emotions and situations got very heavy. This helped remind me to depict the character’s lives as a mixed bag of both joy and sorrow, and include appropriate moments of resolution and levity towards the end of the story.

I think self-publishing sets a precedent for others to follow, which you have done for others. I’m excited to move the talk towards talking about craft in your comics. Did you encounter any new artistic technical challenges while drawing this graphic novel? What’s one problem you encountered that you figured out how to solve in a particularly satisfying way?

I encountered many self-created problems, like changing the page dimensions and also comic panel layout halfway, but it was instructive and helpful to keep redrawing and revising in almost a methodical way.

I started drawing on Procreate (iPad) in late 2020, which set me almost entirely on a digital comics path afterwards. This year in 2023, I was thinking about losing the sense of a fragile human making marks on the page. Drawing by hand reveals wavering, and some of the original pages you can see on this exhibition have tons of white-out mistakes on them. Instead of punishing myself for all the mistakes, or even seeing everything not 100% consistent as a mistake, I kept some of my shaky lines in the book. Shaky lines show that there’s a shaky human making the work.

I inked the linework and colored the black parts by hand, and added grays and lettering digitally. This hybrid process allowed me to continually revise the dialogue and make it legible to the eye, while also keeping some liveliness to the linework.

Much of your comic is driven by different people in conversation with one another, often in one-on-one situations. And as sparse as it is, it’s also natural and conveys the character’s personalities and changes in emotions. How did you write your dialogue?

The dialogue was pretty difficult for me to write. I am not a playwright, and this is my first fiction project. Some of you might be wondering why I started writing fiction with a project of this scale, but I wanted it to be like a training period of working on something long and interconnected so I could learn over many weeks and months.

How people actually talk is not very compelling or natural in written form, and the art of writing dialogue is still something I feel I’m working on. That being said, it’s a very chatty book with many conversations. Partially, I wanted to push back on stereotypes of Asian people as stoic and repressed. Also, it was fun to show characters debating back and forth about things like capitalism and art, and also what emotional debts they owe each other.

In addition, a lot of the comic happens in pauses and waiting, people in silence. One thing I like about being a comic reader is getting to linger on a page for as long as I want. How did you figure out the right pacing for the story?

The problem with drawing silent panels is the fear that your readers might skip past them because they think nothing is happening when the characters are not talking or acting with their bodies. But the hope is that readers will stay in those silences with the characters, which are often full of recognition of what they are struggling to say with each other. In an aesthetic design sense, I love drawing silent panels because they look visually uncluttered by pesky speech bubbles. As a reader, sometimes you might feel tired after following so much dialogue and continuous action and plot. A silent page is a little break for the reader to process.

Something you do beautifully is dealing with big, heavy themes (grief, friendship rhythms and acceptance, family tension, creative doubt, figuring out ambition and uncertainty) without falling into cliché or rushing towards resolution. Who is your imagined reader? What do you hope they will feel or think as they read this?

I almost exclusively used to make autobiographical comics, which at times felt, on my part, a little narcissistic and indulgent. They were always written from my point of view and focused on my perspective of a situation.

Through creating this book, I felt so grateful to sit with all of the different character’s motivations and interior life, not just one of them. A character you might find annoying early in the book might turn out to be someone you relate to, or even feel attached to, later in the book. I want readers to interrogate their own main character syndrome (something I’m guilty of too), to not think of only their needs and feelings overriding everyone else’s.

So much of this book is about people who trust and love each other deeply, having conflicting or ambivalent feelings towards each other. I wanted to depict people failing to show up for each other, and failing to see each other, without it being a total loss or a total break. Even characters who live together or are related by blood can totally see past each other. I wanted to show that some fraught relationships are worth salvaging. There’s a grace that we can extend to each other even when we’re being our worst.

I hope the story will resonate with people who feel they might not deserve another chance, whether it's in their personal dreams, or in a relationship. On the other side of a breakdown, there might still be people who are willing to invest time and love into you, and build you back up again. At least, this is the hope I have for my characters in the story.

I don’t feel there is much broad sympathy for individual mental suffering in Hong Kong. We often see struggling people as problems to be solved, or even as disposable. There isn’t a healing journey from A to B in the book, but there is healing through the time the characters give each other.

How do you feel you’ve changed as an artist since that first graduation show in 2017 you opened this discussion with?

I used to be very fixated on external validation, and every harsh comment or criticism I got would loop in my head like a cursed jingle. One thing I’ve learned about making and sharing my work over the past few years is that: it’s normal and expected, if your work has an audience of any kind, for some people to dislike it or even hate it.

Someone in June 2023, when speaking face to face with me, described my artistic process for Eric’s Sister (analogue line work with digital coloring) as “looking like shit.”

If I had heard that three years ago, especially from this person who happened to be an Ivy league affiliated professional artist, I would have spiraled about it. But what happened when I heard that comment was I just accepted it, and I moved on. We aren’t making art to get A+ or a 100% pass. There isn’t some big Art God who is going to put a medal around us if we do well enough. Sometimes, you have to be your own Art God and give yourself a medal and tell yourself you did good.

It’s a magical thing when something you make privately becomes a story someone can have on their nightstand. When someone reads your work and relates to it, it’s a strange and beautiful feeling to connect. As a reader myself, when I feel deeply transformed by a work, I almost feel as if the author is reaching out their hand to me and holding it. I made a book because I want to be like people who make books, that is, people who want to create emotional and intellectual experiences of transformation.

I learned that it’s enough to try and it’s okay for not everyone to love your work. You can fall flat on your face and still get up the next day. I suppose all books might end up as fuel for a bonfire one day, but it’s fun to make them, and I would love to keep doing it.

This conversation, which originally took place on November 18, 2023 at the book launch for Eric’s Sister, was edited for clarity and length.