Remixing folktales for the Singapore Night Festival

I had the opportunity to collaborate with the National Library to do 3 comics. It was for the Singapore Night Festival this year, which focused on folktales. My work was to select 3 south-east asian folktales from their collection and draw them out. The challenge was to condense several pages of story into single page comics. I simplified the stories and retold them using my own pictures and words. I worked with the library team who decided on leaving the ending open for participants to fill out during the event. And that turned out to be a good idea!

These are the pages I finally produced. We printed them on nice textured paper for the event. Each participant could chose from one of the 3 stories. They could sit in air-con comfort and were provided with black pens and colour pencils. And without telling them the original ending (at first), they did their own version of the ending. This was open to both adults and kids. The objective was to introduce the public to old folktales that most have forgotten. These stories were fresh to me!

This was how the public completed the comics. Some amusing and creative solutions emerged. And some amazing colouring by some very young kids! Big thanks to NLB for inviting me to work with them on this!