"Malaysian John Ho has just published his first graphic novel, and Scary Ever After is a one-man affair, written and illustrated by Ho and no one else.
As you might gather from the title, this is a collection of seven horror stories, so, like Liquid City, it isn’t the kind of thing to use to cure your kid’s insomnia. Some of the stories, such as Fairyland, are full of macabre beauty, while others, like chalk ring, are a cross between H P Lovecraft and your average Asian horror movie.
Ho’s art style is black and white, and he likes to compose his scenes by getting friends to re-enact his storyboards and then take photographs of them. Then he puts the photos in front of him and lets his imagination take off. The style is reminiscent of artist and graphic novelist Dave McKean, who also draws in black and white, and this resemblance is reinforced by one of the two available covers for Scary Ever After, which shows a mixed-media tableau comprising a cat standing on a skull – something that could easily have been mistaken for a McKean creation.
The quality of Ho’s words isn’t as consistent as his artwork, and sometimes is a tad awkward, but it’s nothing that a stern copy editor couldn’t fix.
Scary Ever After originally started life on a website, which was taken down after Ho got a publishing deal, but it’s an interesting approach and gives fans some insight into a work in progress. Ho hopes to publish more graphic novels in the near future, and while he isn’t sure if he will start a website for the next project, hopefully he will decide to let the public into his mind."
Here's another one. This is a local review from The Star by Kaleon Rahan (17th July 2009) :)
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