It's more or a less year since

• My last outdoor public event (The Joe Hisaishi Ghibli concert at the Sidney Myer Bowl in Melbourne). There, I sat on a picnic blanket, surrounded by hundreds of people, maskless, eating cherry tomatoes and Woolies chicken drummets, when coughing at a concert wasn't taboo. Also coincidentally shared the same oxygen space as Neil Gaiman. We both enjoyed the concert. How could we not?
• The first emergency/lockdown escalation in Melbourne, followed by the military-enforced lockdown in Malaysia.The hilarious, incredibly absurd melodrama as Grand Prix week approached, which I witnessed on a front row seat far away from all the actors. I watched as the racecourse was built, as the pre-show concert commenced, as fans from all over the world (especially Italy!) flooded the trams and made their appearances on my streets... only for the whole thing to be cancelled.
• My return home to Malaysia. The timing could not be better.
  Though I still miss Melbourne and sometimes wish I was experiencing lockdown there instead... on the other hand, the loneliness would drive me bonkers. I'm glad to be with my family and be in my city where most of my friends are.

On the rare occasions I step out of my bubble (or, I don't even need to: sometimes the call is coming from inside the house), I time-travel to the era before the rise of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, etc, and encounter publishing or academic or institutional or creative people who think comics are not a valid art form or even a medium. Despite the fact comics are flourishing in the US, already a core part of literature in Europe and Japan, accessible to a varied audience, and proving itself a strong representational medium for a variety of issues/topics/experiences. But I don't have to reiterate the statistics and official articles and journals to confirm this. It should be as mundanely acceptable a phenomenon as prose books and films in the global cultural consciousness, because it already is a part of said consciousness.