Ice

This is Ice. It's my favourite among the few from the Kabuki ceremic mask series that I got awhile ago. I missed Kabuki's original one, but I have Scarab and Siamese (a pair). They're from the comic series Kabuki, by David Mack.

I love masks and have several cheap, simple ones. I guess my interest started when Roger Jenkins introduced maskplay when training my drama group in school. I found them intriguing and full of depth. Something about the strong, silent, purely visual way they spoke appealed to me very deeply, and that got me thinking about the way a body moves, what it says, and what it feels like to watch someone whose body didn't go with their mask (blogged something related to this earlier). And then there's that irritating yet apt scene from the movie The Mask where a stone-faced psychologist says, "We all wear masks, metaphorically speaking."

Perhaps it is the security of hiding behind a mask that comforts me and appeals to me. The feeling of being protected, of minimising exposure and vulnerability. It has also taught me never to take any person purely at face value.

Getting back to Kabuki, David Mack is a truly brilliant artist and storyteller, and the fully painted issues he's published are amazing and read more like works of abstract art than comics. But I think that the black-and-white storylines that he came up with are actually more of a triumph than his painted issues.

This is the first comic I ever bought. I happened to be flipping through a $1 pile at a comic store for the heck of it, and this cover leaped out at me. I took it home, read it, and was stunned. Over the following months, I scrambled through every comic store I knew of to find the rest of this series. Mack tells his stories intelligently and with very effective mood devices.

Kabuki was my jumping off point to other comics and graphic novels. My favourite are:

1. The Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman (one-off from the Sandman series)
2. Kabuki (of course)
3. Neil Gaiman's Sandman
4. Several titles by Slave Labor Graphics, like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and GloomCookie (hey, did you know Singaporean artist Foo Swee Chin is published by SLG? How cool is that.)
5. Will Eisner's graphic novels