Your client is your boss

And for me, that was the truth. After my graduation from university, I have been bumming around since I believe the dream job is worth waiting for. At the meanwhile, I continued to meet clients or organize events as the CDS Projects Manager. However, for now, drawing a fraction of the commission fees, giving tuition to brats and four years of savings can only last you so long in inflation-happy Singapore. I need to get a job. Or at least do something that can hold my finances till that slowpoke stat board replies to me on my job application.  

Hi guys. Remember me? I will look better.

Luckily for me, one of our clients is interested in me enough to offer me an internship. It will be enough for me to hold my financial fort while bolstering my own credentials. Competition Commission of Singapore as I once blogged about, went by the acronym of CCS. Nothing to do with magical girls gathering cards (unfortunately) or art competitions such as Extravaganza but rather they are a government body in charge of promoting and enforcing the Competition Act. A year ago, they commissioned us to draw a manga, Fixed! that would help them educate others about price-fixing and we did just that.

For some reason, the manga turned out to be really popular. It was making rounds as CCS gave it out during their outreach talks. Everyone seemed to like it. Some Temasek Poly students liked it so much (or maybe they don’t have much of a choice) to actually make a life-action version of it, with some changes to the context of course. It was even featured in Competition Policy International, some international web platform for economic competition stuffs. Perhaps they found it a visually more interesting and exciting platform for communicating their messages (which while relevant and important, is kinda boring and dry). The Japanese have been using manga as a platform to communicate state policies for a while but this is a first, non-preachy comic-styled collateral for the Singapore state body.

We didn’t even like it that much. It was a good effort but seriously, CDS is capable of better if we had more time. And so this time, we decided that we will make the next one even better, even more exciting. Something that isn’t just a straight forward case study from a textbook but uses a visually more interesting case study to bring out the lesson within. Something that will give those Temasek Polytechnic students a headache trying to film because it won’t be so vanilla boring. We’ll apologize for giving them a hard time but we will stick to our guns on creating a visually more exciting and narratively more naunced collateral for CCS.

And this time we are starting early. When CCS came knocking on the doors again, WaHa was quickly brought on board the team to provide the visuals while Manzart returned to handle the storyboarding and narrative. We did our pitch and CCS gave us the go-ahead. We are going to make something better and way cooler.

So many steps. And that won't be final version either.

Nothing went perfectly as planned (as usual). There were plenty of hiccups and unexpected side quests that took too long. The new manga is still in the process but it is better, so far. It helped that I am now working within CCS and so feedback and communications is much faster between CDS and CCS. It also helps that I, having worked with the clients as colleagues, can occasionally persuade CCS to accept CDS’ stand on certain artistic issues. There is some give and take so the final product might be somewhat different from our original vision but it is still better.

Be sure to look out for the manga (both Fixed! and Foiled!) in the future when CCS comes down to your campus to conduct their outreach sessions. We will probably be distributing the manga during future events at the CDS booth so even if you don’t take law or economics, you can still have a chance of getting it. When you have it in your hands, be sure to give us your feedbacks on it. We like feedbacks, even the not so nice ones. It would at least be nicer than the quiet subforum we had over at Sgcafe.