Remixing Vanishing Point
By Eunice Lim
Review of Vanishing Point: The Comic Book. Stories by Felix Cheong; Illustrations by Peter Loh, Eko, Cheah Sinann, Ritwick Roy and Riddhi Trivedi, Ali Hamzah, Yolk Chan, Danny Jalil, Sarah Haider, Chao, and Azizi. (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International, 2024)
Side-by-side comparison of the cover of Felix Cheong’s original Vanishing Point (2012) and the cover of the 2024 comic book version.
Vanishing Point: The Comic Book gathers an impressively eclectic range of illustrators to adapt (or remix) Felix Cheong’s original 2012 collection of stories into a comic book format. Inspired by real-life cases of missing people in Singapore, Cheong’s original collection of the same name was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award and two of the stories — ‘True Singapore Ghost Story’ and ‘The Boy with the Missing Thumb’ — were chosen as GCE ‘O’ level Literature texts.
In the foreword for the original 2012 version, Singaporean novelist Daren Shiau describes the collection as ‘a magically realistic universe reminiscent of Murakami, of people who mysteriously disappear, who harbour untold secrets, are behavioural addicts and who are haunted by psychophysiological demons such as phantom limbs’. We certainly do not wish to speculate about, pathologize, or elevate the cases of missing persons in Singapore to a spectacle, and the promotional copy for the original Vanishing Point implicitly cautions against this.
Yet, in an overcrowded Singapore notorious for its zealous urban planning and exacting human resource management, the appeal of a vanishing point — characterized by a relief from hypervisibility and societal expectations into a state of comforting obscurity — does lend Cheong’s stories an unsettling, aspirational quality. The many miserable characters described in the book as having ‘nothing [...] to look back on and nothing to look forward to’ appear to find solace either in the final ‘sheer invisibility of [actual] death, blissful and undisturbed’ or by retreating into social oblivion. This throughline that undergirds all the stories in Vanishing Point seems overly grim and risks overdetermining the devastating consequences of living in a fast-paced city.
From ‘True Singapore Ghost Story’. Illustrated by Sarah Haider.
The foreword for this 2024 comic book adaptation by writer Dave Chua is right to commend Cheong for having ‘allowed the comic pages to breathe’ by not dominating half the page with the writer’s words. An effective showcase of varying art styles, Vanishing Point (2024) definitely breathes new visual and interpretive life and interest into Cheong’s stories. However, the textual and paginal brevity of these remixed narratives also intensifies the moralizing quality of these stories, and they can feel paternalistic and repetitive at times, like an Aesop’s Fables for unrepentant citizens.
From ‘The Boy with the Missing Thumb’. Artwork by Chao.
For example, ‘The Boy with the Missing Thumb’ tells the story of a regular secondary school boy waking up to find that he is mysteriously missing a thumb, a thumb that he relies on to win a video game he is obsessed with. Treating the villain in his video game as a proxy of his school bully, the boy becomes obsessed with securing victory in the game and believes his missing thumb is a sign that his body is mutating to better adapt to this misguided quest. By the end of the story, the boy secures his victory, but both of his hands are now fused with the video game controller. It is easy to see why this cautionary tale for youths was selected as a GCE ‘O’ Level Literature text, but hopefully, students who studied this text were able to get more out of the story beyond the exhausted reiteration of video game addiction as a social ill.
From ‘The Little Drummer Boy’. Illustrated by Cheah Sinann.
In a similar vein, ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ tells the story of a young drummer in a band who follows in his estranged father’s footsteps by making a number of bad decisions, only to regret his estrangement from his groupie girlfriend and the baby they have out of wedlock. Likewise, ‘You Will Be Out Like a Light’ is about a womanizing magician who loses control of his craft as he loses control of his mismanaged love life. ‘True Singapore Ghost Story’ is yet another morality tale about a man who suffers the consequences of his reckless financial and lifestyle choices. The bulk of these stories revolve around male characters, cautioning against a predictable list of vices. Not only does this render the male characters quite indistinguishable from one another, but the narrative sentencing of these characters into social oblivion or moral malaise leaves little room for error, redemption, or resolution.
From ‘In the Dark’. Illustrated by Peter Loh.
The stories ‘In the Dark’ and ‘Life Sentence’ distinguish themselves, however, by capturing the suffocating effects of draconian, institutional environments. ‘In the Dark’ tells the story of an elderly army clerk whose rare optic condition results in an obsession with clinical whiteness and clerical efficiency, so much so that his ‘dark Peranakan Chinese’ wife becomes an eyesore. When his wife mysteriously disappears, strands of her dyed-white hair inexplicably begin to show up in the old man’s apartment. ‘Life Sentence’ tells the story of a guard for prisoners on death row who struggles with his own existential ‘life sentence’ and mortality. The use of colours in ‘Life Sentence’ by illustrators Ritwick Roy and Riddhi Trivedi is particularly memorable, beautifully capturing the haunting atmosphere and claustrophobic architecture of the city.
Panels from ‘Life Sentence’. Illustrated by Ritwick Roy and Riddhi Trivedi.
Panels from ‘Melanie & Molly’. Illustrated by Yolk Chan.
‘Melanie & Molly’ is the only story with a female protagonist in the volume. Melanie, a dyslexic author, begins to lose grip on her reality when she believes that words in her book have disappeared. As the author and the fictional protagonist of her book begin to meld into one, the former inherits her character’s body dysmorphia, low self-esteem, and paranoia. Reflecting the complex relationship between a writer and their characters, this metafictional story is a refreshing change compared to the unforgiving depictions of male characters in this volume. Yolk Chan’s illustrations are remarkably detailed overlays of text and visuals and exemplify the potential of a remix to bring a new perspective to an original work.
Other stories like ‘The 10th Floor’ and ‘Wormhole of 2030’ emphasize supernatural and science-fiction themes respectively, lending the volume a nostalgic quality that one might associate with reading Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (1740) or watching The X-Files. The popular semi-anthological dark comedy horror comic book series Ice Cream Man and the best-selling True Singapore Ghost Stories also come to mind. In ‘The 10th Floor’, a man who is under pressure to return the company funds he misappropriated is constantly haunted by visitors looking for a 10th floor in his 9-storey apartment building. In ‘Wormhole of 2030’, a mysterious wormhole causes Singaporeans to disappear and show up in some other location. Amongst the victims of this wormhole is Siong, an opposition party politician who goes missing before the general elections.
This is not the first time Cheong has worked with illustrators for the publication of his writing. For example, Eko, the illustrator for the story ‘Because I Tell’ in Vanishing Point, has also previously worked with Cheong on the poetry comic book The Year of the Virus (2020). I was thus particularly interested in how the respective illustrators approached, translated, and remixed Cheong’s original narrative material in these visual retellings and believe insight into this process would be invaluable to aspiring writers and illustrators alike. Danny Jalil filmed a short behind-the-scenes video about his process working on ‘The 10th Floor’ for the book’s launch (link). Otherwise, further insight into this remixing and intermedia process is regrettably absent from Vanishing Point and could have been more prominently foregrounded, whether in the style of a supplementary commentary or in the form of rough sketches and annotated storyboards.
That being said, this remix of Vanishing Point still provides a delightful sample of illustrative styles, and those interested in broadening their understanding of comics or discovering new artists would appreciate what the volume offers. These intermedia collaborations enrich the Asian comics scene, and this is especially heartening in light of the recent 2024 Singapore Writers Festival, which featured a significant number of graphic novel and comics-themed events. At a time when generative artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to disrupt and even upend creative industries, mutual support and sustained collaboration among creatives across cultures and mediums are even more important, and this remixed edition of Vanishing Point is certainly a commendable fruit of such labours.
According to Goodreads, Eunice Lim’s top three most-read genres for 2024 are fiction, non-fiction, and graphic novels. She is a big fan of It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (2022) by British comic book artist Zoe Thorogood and Pulp (2020) by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. She was formerly a postdoctoral teaching fellow in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University and has published journal articles in ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Global Storytelling, and Antipodes.
Eunice Lim reviews Vanishing Point: The Comic Book.