Synergy

Here’s an interesting example of a comic travelogue: Tiny Adventure Journal. It’s the work of artist Shing Yin Khor, a sculptor, an illustrator and a comics artist from Los Angeles. The comic is her artists’ journal, following her in her travels, between various residencies and commissions, across the US and Canada. Along the way she records her visits to weird and wonderful museums, botanic gardens, comics conventions and colleges.

Shing Yin Khor makes a lot of imaginative comics – but it’s interesting to find someone who uses the comics form not just as a great creative medium, but as an effective documentary one as well. Read Tiny Adventure Journal and The Center for Otherworld Science and you’ll find a nice sense of synergy between the fiction-storytelling and the record-keeping, informational side of the craft.

I think we all already know that good storytelling is good storytelling, and it doesn’t matter if you’re writing about aliens, flying whales and other dimensions – or insects, fossils and ancient Rome. Comics is a fluid practice, and creators can jump happily between genres: from fiction to fact, creative to applied, science to science-fiction. What would Tiny Adventure Journal be like without The Center for Otherworld Science in its DNA?