50 years of experiences ÷ 200 pages = 3 months of history per page

Trying to carve a lifetime of material into 200 pages means there's A LOT that gets cut. And then when you start trying to transform what's left from a heaping mass of events into a [hopefully] coherent, cohesive, and compelling story, even more gets trashed. Of the massive amounts left on the cutting room floor, I'm making comic strips. More on this soon-ish.

A picture's worth a thousand words (which converts to 7,000,000 vietnamese words)

During the course of researching this project, I've collected some wild family photos. In addition to resonating with me on a very personal level, the unspoken historical and cultural insight they provide is invaluable. A prime example is this image of my grandmother with her grandmother:

Facebook, shmacebook!

I finally finished my time machine and blasted myself into the futuristic early 2000’s to harness this new “blog” technology. The main purpose of this is to post regularly as my next comic project comes to fruition--attempts at not completely disappearing off the map as I pour my energies into an upcoming graphic memoir. I’ll try to focus on “Vietnamerica”-related postings, but half the fun for me is seeing what this blog [d]evolves in to as the project develops.

The story is my family’s survival through three wars and subsequent immigrant experience from Vietnam to America. I started uncovering this hidden history in 2001 and began serious work on it in 2006. Recently, I’ve been blessed with a publisher willing to help bring it to life (more on that later) so finally here I am doing what I love all day long AND on a dream project! And all without ever having a Facebook/Myspace/Friendster profile--booyah!

Here’s preview art from the project’s original proposal: