2017 Golden Comic Awards for Best Cross-media Application
We hear so much about well-known towns having “sister cities” far on the other side of the world, places where citizens from each seem fated never to go: Texas towns have sister cities in Germany and China, while even Portland, Maine is twinned with Yokohama, Japan. In this lovely graphic narrative, 61Chi tells her own story as both tourist and local in two regions that have never officially met: her home town in souther Taiwan, and the small hamlet of Krumlov in the Czech Republic.
If neither of these names are familiar to you, so much the better: there will be more to surprise and delight your eyes among these pages. The author and illustrator spent three months as a resident artist in Krumlov, a drive-by town in the green hills of the Czech Republic, and as she changed from tourist to familiar face, her pen and charcoal captured moments, expressions, and vistas that somehow brought her mind back to her old home.
Though these pages are not crowded with words, the activity and the color of their illustrations more than fills the silence. Sketches that seem the perfect work of an instant depict two towns as they really are, as well as the people who cross, meet, and part along their streets.
