On the 27th December of 2017, my classmates and I gathered early in the morning at the Student Service Centre Building (STAD) for a short briefing by Mr Anuar (@sireh). He seemed fairly excited about the trip and adviced us to take lots of pictures for our resume. Afterwards, the bus swiftly departed from MMU. The ride there was very smooth; we got a good bus driver this time compared to the last few bumpy rides.

11:00am,
We arrived at Museum Negara in a separate bus from our lecturer, who drove there because of the lack of space in the bus. He had invited the juniors as well to join us, and the bus didn't have enough space for them so @sireh was kind enough to give them a ride in his car.

GUEST ARTISTS SPEAKERS

Abg Mie (@abgmie) and Jaafar Taib were the guest speakers for the talk on Malaysia Cartoons, the future and our potential. Jaafar Taib touched more on how we as a Malaysian need to find our own style. He urged us to stray away from any foreign influence, especially anime. Because in order to separate us from the crowd we needed to find our own identity and look. He suggested using animals as characters, because they are globally accepted and represents the country as well. I've always looked up to Jafaar Taib, ever since I was a little girl. Back then, I had read a series of storybooks I borrowed from the library illustrated by him and those illustrations were so beautiful. The book is called 'Sang Kancil' and all the illustrations were painted with watercolour, which was what made me interested in painting.

Anyway, I whole-heartedly agree with his statement, and I have always tried to Malaysianize my drawings. But someway, it always turns out looking anime and it can be quite frustrating. The ‘anime-style’ was what we grew up with, it’s been exposed to us for so long and its not easily forgotten through our trained fingers. I wanted to ask him this. I wanted to know how do you get rid of something you knew all your life. But I couldn’t get the opportunity to throughout the whole day.
Maybe the answer just lies in practice.

THE EXHIBITION

In the exhibition, there were showcases on the art of animation and also the history of animation. There were so many core fundamental examples of what a Malaysian comic art should look like and how it came to be.

A rotoscope. A brief glance at the history of how animation started.

Jaafar Taib spoke about the comics they have published, particularly Gila Gila and how they will be 40 years old in the upcoming April 2018 with 805 published copies.

A world record for the most published comics in the world. This fact really surprised me.

Another thing I also noticed was this...

Notice the price underneath the title, ‘Canmalican’. It reads ‘HARGA $1.20’. These comics dated back to when we were under the reign of the British!

This mascot was also something of a familiarity to me, and someone kindly explained to me its relation to the Commenwealth Games held in Malaysia and how it was a really huge event last time. A part of me remembered me, though not much. But this mascot I had certainly seen everywhere. Must’ve been good marketing.

But lets not forget, trends can also be part of the humour for comics too! This was a trend last year called ‘Salt Bae’ and its interesting for them to notice it.

ARTSTYLES

There were so many different artstyles and all of them were really amazing. The humour, which I didn’t appreciate when I was younger, but now grown I have come to understand it and gained a huge respect for the old cartoonist. Creating something funny isn’t easy but they managed to do it so many times and for so long. It must’ve been really hard, especially when you do it for 40 years. I have so much respect for them after seeing all the works.

My favourite ones were the watercolour artworks, so beautiful.

Old memories triggered in my mind with this one.

When we were younger, we use to use this word a lot when making fun of others. Steam here means ‘in love’ or for a more direct term, ‘horny’. Immediately when my friends and I saw this we remembered and laughed away and the memories came back. It was such a silly use of word and definitely cherished.

MY WORK BEING EXHIBITED AS A PART OF ‘SCROLL’

Scroll is a comic made by MMU students, which features life as a student that will be published sometime soon.*

At the last part of the exhibition, I saw MMU’s logo proudly planted on the wall of the museum, along with our works all over the wall. It was in collaboration with the Comic House Malaysia, with our lecturer Mr Anuar being part of the reason why it happened. He put in such amazing effort for his students and I really appreciate him as a lecturer. Our art being exhibited in the National Musuem is such a big deal, and for it to happen at such a young age for us will definitely come back to give us a pat on our back.

I wondered to myself, how many people had seen our work? Were they impressed with our work? How many are excitedly waiting for the next generation of ‘Gila-Gila’, ‘Gelihati’, or ‘Apo’? Or will we even make it at all? Only time will tell what the future holds. But I hope that future will be a good one.

STEEMIT MEET UP

At the end of the exhibition, I met with @perennial and @zord189, who were giving out free Steemit shirts to us. They were such nice people, all smiles and good greetings. I was a bit worried at first, because they seem quite stern in the group chat but was relieved to see how friendly they were in real life. We also had a short interview session for a while before we had to go back to the speaker talk that was going on.

4:00pm,
Bus departed from Museum Negara back to MMU. A momentous day, shame we couldn’t spend more time looking around. Only had about 1 hour to look around because our schedule was packed. I really appreciate all the effort the lecturers and the Malaysian Comic House took to make this exhibition a success and I hope this gives them even more recognition in a global aspect.

At the end of the day...

I don't really take a lot of pictures of myself, I feel bad asking someone to take my picture. So I mostly capture what's going on around me.

Here's my friend @izbubbles grabbing some ice cream after a long and hot day.

Us taking a group picture!

Here's me in the bus going back to MMU. I'm also wearing a Steemit shirt given to us by @perennial! Cant see it in the picture though (sorry for the shaky camera hehe)...

Thanks for reading!

Posted this while I was really sleepy and tired... Gonna hit the hay now, goodnight Steemians!

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