DrowZ On Comics and introducing Chea P. Ros' Sharks Don't Sleep; A solarpunk action-adventure comic with lots of food.

I sat down to start writing this article on 7/14 at around 7:30 AM, and it is 9PM the following day when I've finally put pen to paper. Well, finger to keyboard. I'll spoil it here, I'm segueing into an indie comic and before I get there I want to talk a bit about the medium.

Comic books were a big part of my life growing up, and super heroes even more so. I have vivid memories of watching the myriad cartoons of spandex wearing super heroes, saving lives while fighting a colorful cast of rogues and heading to the arcade to watch those same characters do battle with my favorite video game characters in Marvel VS Capcom 2.

It was an early enthrallment, when the show was over and my quarters ran dry I always found myself wanting to spend more time with these characters. I wanted to know more, I wanted to see more, and that's how I wound up getting into the comics.

And there were a lot of comics, hundreds of them by the time I'd gotten into them. They were also so different from the things I had seen on TV - they were much darker.

I'll always remember the first time I saw Wolverine actually use his claws on something that wasn't a robot, it filled me with the same kind of energy that staying up after my bedtime game me - a false sense of maturity.

Reading comics from the 2000's and early 2010s, a period where the super hero genre exploded into the main stream in the form of big, block buster movies. Reading the source material made me feel smarter and more mature.

For the most part, each movie was a conglomeration of several story-lines. As the resident comic book nerd in my high-school class, I had people coming to me for info about what was coming next in the Marvel movie saga. I was mysterious, or at least it felt that way.

I regaled my classmates with rumors of upcoming deaths in The Walking Dead, how Iron Man conquered his alcohol addiction and that time Spider-Man mutated into a giant spider and gave birth to himself (look up Changes if you don't know that one).

Shock factor wasn't a thing I'd thought of much, I knew what it was, but I always kept it at a surface level understanding; media threw curve balls at you for the sake of viewer retention. It worked, I kept coming back to my local comic store week after week, loading up on comics from the Brian Michael Bendises, the Mark Millars and Matt Fractions. I piled up on plot threads from a doze n different comics with two dozen writers, only for them to come to a head in the brand-wide event.

For the unaware, every so often the big two comic book companies, Marvel and DC, will put out these big stories that span across a majority of their titles. These included things like Marvel Comics' Civil War and its sequel, and DC's Darkest Night and Forever Evil. Big, franchise changing events that often featured a high body count.

As fun as some of these were, I remember reading these out of necessity as opposed to any conscious desire to figure out just what caused my favorite super heroes to beat each other up. To me, these stories always felt weaker than the sum of their parts.

It was more than likely a symptom of being involved in a franchise as large as Marvel- writers had to turn someone else's characters into their own and this has lead to a situation where astute comic readers will reference a character as "Matt Fraction's Hawkeye" or "Dan Slott's Spider-Man." They were recognizable iterations that were certainly the same character, but there were stylistic differences that were found in only that writer's work.

Eventually, I grew fatigued from the genre in other ways - the stakes grew to big, the characters too violent, the casts too homogenized. These are large, sweeping generalizations that may be unfair in the current day, but it is how I felt. I would go through twenty series and only find three that I considered good, and they were also only quality for a short amount of time. The 2011 run of Punisher is astronomically good- it was a year, a writer and a set of issues.

This makes the field of mainstream comics astronomically difficult to parse, especially for new readers. You can ask someone their favorite superhero and point them at a comic, only for it to be three stores into an arc and reference stuff that happened three years ago.

It also feels really weird to call Marvel and DC mainstream, even though their characters have been household names for the last twenty years, I think it's fair to say that the entire comic genre has never been mainstream, at least not in my lifetime.

Still, indie and creator owned comics are a niche within a niche that always capture the best parts of the medium, a combination of written and visual storytelling.

At lot of their power comes from being smaller projects built from a desire to tell a story. It's no secret that the X-Men were created as a way to speak about racial injustices in a time where getting a story with minority main characters published and sold was difficult - but today creators have so many more options to have their creations seen. It's just that the lack of a familiar brand adds an extra hoop to find them.

Sharks Don't Sleep
By Chea P. Ros

Sharks Don't Sleep is described by its creator, Chea P. Ros, as a Solarpunk, Action-Adventure food comic. It's a story about a chef named Zhaki Se'Lachi and his quest to cook for his world's God while humanity at large plots to kill that same God..

Currently in development, Sharks Don't Sleep in its current incarnation appears as a celebration of the peoples and cultures that often get passed over in the mainstream.

It depicts a diverse, oceanic world that where culture and creation intersect. Humanity, seeking to expand and develop, sees the deity obstructions and seeks to remove them.

Ros themselves is the non-binary child of Khmer immigrants who left home to escape the Cambodian genocide of the 1970's. A four year long stretch where the Cambodian government killed a quarter of the nation's population in pursuit of a master race. Through storytelling, Ros hopes to help create stories about marginalized groups that aren't given the time in popular media.

The cast of Sharks Don't Sleep, even in its early state, reflects these goals. Its characters are diverse in both ethnicity but also sexual and gender orientation.While decision to include so much food in the iconography is symbolic of one of the biggest methods that people share their cultures (It also just looks really tasty).

Ros's art is textured and striking, their usage of sharp angles and thick lines give some astonishing depth to each piece - characters pop right off the page and it especially sells the taste and texture of the food.

I met Ros two years ago at a fighting game tournament, I was playing their partner in an on stream match. Ros was in the audience cheering for them.

Recalling the actual match is hard for me because so much of it was dominated by Ros's spirited cheering. It actually felt like a scene in an anime where the protagonist realizes that their rival has friends too.

It's this kind of energy that spills through all of Ros's work, a genuine appreciation of existing. Everyone has their own story to tell, and everyone deserves to be represented.

You can follow Ros and the development of Sharks Don't Sleep over on Ros' website, Sharkteath.com.

And be sure to follow them on Twitter and Instagram.

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Thanks for reading! This piece has a bit of a different structure to it. I've had a bit of a busy week but it was really fun digging through Chea's website and various feeds to write a bit about their work. Mé is my personal favorite of their cast.

I'd love to show you guys more of it at some point, but also try and read some indie comics sometime. Hit up Webtoon.com or the comics subreddit. I think people should spend more time lifting up smaller projects, especially those with lots of representation, as opposed to waiting for Disney to make a profit off of yet another culture's folktales.

Your friends have stories to tell, ask them stuff sometime.

The discord is still around, here's a link for that https://discord.gg/x4vvzeu

Looking for people to play some crappy video games with, hop in!