Tales of High Strangeness

Hong Kong Komics: A rambling comic about the rambling city of Hong Kong.


What I miss most about being in Hong Kong is having no clue what anyone was saying. Sure, it made trying to ask a shopkeeper in the battery farm of dubious geek goods that is the Sino Centre what the differences between the different counterfeit copies of Lupin the 3rd were difficult, but that’s a small price to pay (and one made smaller by a good exchange rate) for the benefit of not being able to understand other people’s carrying conversations.

I’m sure the Mong Kok teenagers were as  obnoxious as those back home but what would have been infuriatingly asinine in English was rendered a musical cascade with lack of understanding.

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Four Coloured Hell: Musings on comics in Macau.

A young man’s erotic journey from Hong Kong to Macau…
Or, rather more accurately, a tale of my search for the comics culture of Macau.

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Tits And That: Musings on comics in Mong Kok.

What follows is the first of many rambling, fairly obvious and shallow, observations on the comics community and culture in Hong Kong and Macau.

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A few days ago a friend made the mistake of asking if I’d seen Prometheus, which allowed me to subject them to a vast rambling tirade about how horrific a film it was. I could feel my brow sweat, my hands become clammy as they gesticulated wildly and my speech slushing about in eagerness to express bitter disillusionment. The sad thing is, it isn’t the first time this has happened, I’ve already let loose this same rampage to the Ozone Nightmare podcast following their two Prometheus discussion episodes. What follows in this post is an attempt to coral those dark, gritty, and bitter thoughts of disapproval into a somewhat intelligible experience. 

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I have a slightly sordid admission to make, I’m not proud of it and don’t really understand it but, I own an Amecomi Girl statuette. It’s an Anime-style (meaning “cartoonily sexualised”) figurine of Batgirl about the size of a Star Wars figure that looks entirely unlike the character of Batgirl. I mean sure, she has pointy ears and a utility belt and even a cat in her arms, but it’s the the accessory of seediness that undermines the toy. Despite the desperation leaking out of the box I eagerly bought the thing, this was at a stage where anything with “Batgirl” on the box would be a sell.

I’ve not suffered from that compulsion since buying the Amecomi Batgirl statue.

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Marvel Star Wars issues #68/69.
Script/writer: David Michelinie, layouts/pencils: Gene Day, finishes/inks: Tom Palmer, colours: Glynis Wein, letters: Joe Rosen.

A long time ago…

It is from the hazy pre-Wookiepedia days of 1983 that Marvel Star Wars #68-69 emerged, spilling out of the hands of writer David Michelinie and artists Gene Day and Tom Palmer, a continuing story of our band of heroes: Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, R2D2, C3PO and Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian. It’s an epic of romance, of heroes and villains, of retroactive continuity and lovely layouts. It’s Star Wars, as the Special Edition adverts would say in 1997 “for the first time all over again”. Indeed, these issues (and later Marvel Star Wars issues) offer glimpses of both an awkward past and and intriguing future for the Star Wars franchise.

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