5 Questions with Annie Huang
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Annie Huang is a storyteller, creative director, and curator.
In 2020, they drew and wrote 20/20 (Blueprint Comics) a comic about one week in January in 2020.
No.1
Can you tell how 20/20 came to be?
20/20 started as a story without an ending, a story I intensely wanted to share with everybody on the planet, as we slowly went into our collective second year of pandemic. I was so sure I had a take on what was happening and that it was worth sharing. I also quite desperately needed to find out if I was alone with my very specific struggles. Eventually, with those feelings swimming in my brain, I wrote a concept and a timeline, and chewed on that for three weeks while I decided what format would suit the story. When I sent what I had (at this stage a series of thumbnails to accompany a script) to a friend of mine, he told me that I absolutely had to make it into a comic, that I really did absolutely have to publish it, and who I should talk to, to make it happen.
It took a bit of convincing, but eventually the story became a 60+ page comic. I slapped a three month deadline on it myself (to the apprehension of all involved), because I seemingly cannot finish personal projects without some sort of time pressure, and also because I wanted to publish during Lunar New Year, as it’s relevant to the story.
20/20 wouldn’t have made it even to the concept stage if it hadn’t been for the intensive year of therapy I had done to personally process what had happened to me. I can’t thank both my therapists enough for getting me through the very rough first few weeks of COVID-19 in 2020. A global pandemic being a trigger to past global pandemics is an odd way to explain the concept of triggers as a serious subject, but now that we’ve all been in it for long enough I felt like it was exactly the right time to share this story. It just happens to be a comic.
No.2
The story considers the parallels between 2020 and the SARS pandemic, sliding between temporalities—can you speak to this beautiful depiction of the passing of time?
My depiction of time in the comic is how I feel it pass, actually. I don’t have any real sense of chronological time when I recall past events, and especially because this was about a trigger that’s the size of the planet, my sense of time in the first few weeks of COVID-19 was almost a complete blank.
Having this wonky sense of time, I’ve learned over the years that I need various methods of recording myself, so that I can trigger memories. When I was putting together the timeline at the very early stages of writing the script, I had to do a lot of detective work to figure out what I was doing in that week of January 2020. I had recorded videos of myself for my own records, had an archive of Instagram stories, notes from therapy sessions, and my planner, which recorded where I was going on which days.
The difficult part was putting myself back into the headspace of that week in order to visually depict what the rush of remembering 2003 was like. Over the years I had remembered little bits and pieces of the almost two years I lived in China, but they never felt relevant, and I wasn’t sure how to bring it up.
This isn’t how all triggers work, but COVID-19 triggered my memories and trauma of SARS. My timelines of 2003 and 2020 began to cross over into each other. I began working through it in therapy, but understanding something theoretically doesn’t necessarily mean that you can put it into practice immediately. Since I had left SARS era China in 2003 after my school shut down, I found myself desperately waiting for schools to close here, so my timelines could diverge, and my brain could calm down.
No.3
Without ever moving past January 2020, you manage to evoke the deep fear, and the strange suspension of 2020. What inspired you to make this choice?
I’m not sure I would call it a choice—the fear and the suspension of time were as soul-tearing as I felt at the time, so I was trying to stay as true to my original experience as possible. 20/20 isn’t a happy story, but the relief is in knowing that there was a point where I could push forward and process and move beyond the fear and suspension. The point of the comparison was to say: this isn’t the first time people have felt the way that we’re all feeling, and that there will be a time when we move past all of this.
No.4
We’d love to hear more about your drawing process.
I’m usually more of a traditional, tactile artist but with my three-month deadline, fast-tracked processes I would normally go through to get to the finish line for 20/20. I had done three-page comics for Blueprint anthologies in the past, so I was familiar with what I had to deliver to print, which was useful in finding shortcuts.
Coming from video and audio work, I find it quite significant to be able to control the pace at which an audience (or reader, in this case) experiences a story, so the pacing of space between intense moments of lots happening is really important for me. In video and audio, this is done by measuring the time of things happening. In comics, I’ve found that reading time spent on one spread and the act of flipping a page can be a measurement of time. I spend a lot of time thinking about movement and flow, so my illustration and comic work often has fewer borders or panels.
On a more technical note, a final spread with lots of story, text and detail can take me up to a week and a half, and spacing pages that are more flowing and conceptual can take a day or two. I spent the bulk of my time on thumbnails, storyboarding and script editing, because if the overall concept works, then each page will too.
No.5
What did you draw inspiration from, while writing 20/20?
I spend a lot of time looking at mental health discussions on social media to refine my own thoughts and feelings. @rubyetc_ has been a long time favourite of mine. @tarabooth has made autobio comics that have carried me through plenty of situations. @davidshrigley has a spectacularly succinct way of describing concepts. @yumisakugawa combines very pointed questions with illustrations that make me ask questions about myself that I would otherwise not think of. These people (and many others) have created descriptions, analogies and humour about mental health have helped me find and craft my own over the years.
On an even more specific and slightly separate note, @portlandchildart has been sharing pandemic era art by children, which propelled me into thinking about my own experiences of being a child going through a pandemic.
I’m blessed to have many friends and peers around me who are creating art that inspires me visually and conceptually. I spend a lot of time exploring Wikipedia for fun and reading up on the bizarre reality that we live in. I like reading and learning about things that I don’t understand, discussing whatever meta in whatever subject that is occupying my ADHD brain that week, spending time reading back on my old work, old journal entries, old art and writing about looking back on things I’ve made in the past. A lot of my inspiration comes from trying to understand myself and why I am the way that I am, which involves various forms of therapy more often than not. I guess I look inward to myself for inspiration just as much as I look outward at others.
I spend time existing in the world, and things happen. Autobio comics are a little bit like that—reality is strange enough, that if you just carry on existing, something nice or weird or intense might just happen. Spending time to record those things in various forms sometimes ends up in a story that might be a comic. The important part of that is to carry on existing and, preferably, living and thriving.
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