In My Time

I’ve never been to an Army Open House because I don’t have kids to bring them to, and my fam­ily would scream if I asked them “hey you wanna go to the Army Open House and see Army gear and stuff?” and they’d scream, “We wash your Army gear every time you come back from reservist”, and they’d scream, “if that’s your idea of a joke, it’s not funny”.

So I’ve never been to an Army Open House.

Until Sat­ur­day, that is. And I was pretty chuffed about see­ing the lat­est in Army gear, and was even more chuffed to see a sign point­ing to one of them:

Good thing I slowed down. Might have hurt some people:

The teem­ing crowds didn’t seem to be both­ered though:

Apart from Army gear, it isn’t every day one gets to give a comic book to a defence minister:

And then spend a few hours telling peo­ple “yes” at the Open House who ask in Man­darin, “Is this book for sale?”, when they actu­ally mean to be ask­ing, “How come it’s not free?”

And the crowd goes wild

Still, it’s not every day one gets to auto­graph books for kids:

And then meet the author of one of the country’s most pop­u­lar books — one that was made a movie:

with Angelina and Adrian Tan

Out­side, my best friend was get­ting pho­tographed as often as some of the exhibits:

No, the sign­board I men­tioned ear­lier wasn’t point­ing to him.

Inside, I was explain­ing to the Chief of Army that “no, I’m not the clown in page 36–37 of the comic book”:

But seri­ously though, “In My Time” is a comic book writ­ten by me with a lot, a lot of help from var­i­ous peo­ple from the pub­lish­ing com­pany, Mar­shall Cavendish, Min­def (who gave me all the pho­tographs I said I wanted, although for some rea­son, the old Ali Baba bag couldn’t be found), and the indomitably cheer­ful illus­tra­tor Chua Jon Dep, who, despite being Malaysian and based in KL, man­aged to draw the car­toons I described to him over the phone and email over a period of two months.

And if you buy the book, you’ll see at the bot­tom left cor­ner of every two pages, there’s a lit­tle march­ing sol­dier who, well, marches as you flip the pages. Yes, I know it’s called a flip book ani­ma­tion. That was the idea of the lay­out graphic artist, Lock Hong Liang, another long suf­fer­ing fella who thought it was a great idea to put in the march­ing sol­dier in all the pages, then did so, then woke up one morn­ing in a panic because he realised the pages weren’t finalised yet, and if we had swapped or omit­ted pages, his march­ing sol­dier ani­ma­tion would have gone to shits. So it was a good thing we didn’t.

with Hong Liang and Jon Dep

The one thing that really wasn’t fun at all was the fact that Naomi was at home, her back hav­ing flared up in the last few days, and she wasn’t able to accom­pany me to my first ever book launch, and to see Army gear. Hmmm…

On sale in book­stores from 21 Sep­tem­ber. Only $9.95!

Tech­no­rati Tags: army, NS40, sin­ga­pore, total defence