Memories of Taiwan: A Comic Anthology edited by Ray Hecht

An irresistible mosaic of art, adventure, and belonging.

Hecht gathers the complete Visions of Taiwan series into an eclectic comics anthology featuring 18 writers and artists whose lives have intersected with the island. Through stories of scooter mishaps, festivals, trains, art, illness, work, travel, and cultural adjustment, the contributors offer intimate glimpses of everyday Taiwan while exploring how an unfamiliar place can gradually become home. 

Hecht wisely allows the contributors’ individual voices and artistic approaches to drive the collection. The result is deliberately varied, moving from loose autobiographical sketches and digital illustration to densely worked black-and-white art. That visual unpredictability suits a book concerned with perspective: no two contributors experience Taiwan in quite the same way. Particularly engaging are pieces that transform mundane encounters into revealing cultural observations. Hecht’s “How Not to Get Your Scooter License in Taiwan” turns bureaucracy into self-deprecating comedy, while Bronwen Shelwell’s “Ghost Month,” Jon Renzella’s “Tomb Sweeping,” and Fabienne Good’s “The Taiwanese Farm Adventure” locate cultural discovery in ordinary experience.  

The collection gains emotional depth when contributors examine the harder realities of building lives abroad. Loneliness, artistic uncertainty, work, health, and cultural displacement sit comfortably alongside friendship, humor, creativity, and discovery. Patty Hogan’s “My Black Hole,” an account of receiving treatment for a serious eye condition, becomes an affecting meditation on health care and the freedom to keep creating. Though the shifting styles inevitably make some entries more memorable than others, that unevenness reinforces the anthology’s communal character. Lovers of graphic memoirs, travel comics, and cross-cultural storytelling will find much to savor here.

A lively love letter to everyday Taiwan.

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Coming soon

SLG Publishing

Cover Design Bronwen Shelwell