Now, she lives for cyborgs in ever-expanding online story
By Chuck O’Donnell, Special Writer
It was hard enough for Christine Chong to fit in after her family left Taiwan in 1997 with little more than some clothes, a few personal items and dreams of a new life in Hillsborough.
She was 15 and had no friends, and before she could start to learn English, she got her first lesson in culture shock at Hillsborough High.
”My mom sent me to school with this lunchbox bright yellow,” Ms. Chong said. “Everybody else brought their lunches in a brown bag. The bright yellow lunch box didn’t help. That made me a target (of some bullies) for a while.”
Isolated and lonely, she found refuge in the pages of the few comic books she had brought from her homeland. When she got tired of re-reading them, she started to draw her own adventures. Day after day, she escaped into the worlds she was creating with pencils, paper and her imagination.
She eventually would make some friends and started to make her way in the world, but she never stopped drawing.
Today, her tale of a near-future world inhabited with genetically modified humans, cyborgs and nefarious corporations bent on establishing their own nations has built a cult following.
Ms. Chong began posting small pieces of the “E-Depth Angel” saga online in 2001 under her pen name, Mayshing. Eventually, she would post new installments a few times a week, much in the same way a three- or four-panel comic strip adds up to a bigger arc.
Some 12 years later, the story has grown to 21 chapters spread across 800 pages, and her audience has been known to swell to as many as 3,000 viewers when a new installment is posted.
Each chapter now has been published in full-color magazine format, thanks in part to the $1,250 she raised recently through indiegogo.com, a crowd-funding site where her fans pledged money for various perks ranging from one magazine ($10) to the entire collection ($160).
The story of “Angel Love” has all the twists and turns of a soap opera. Angel is 14 and works for a major company/independent country called Seon Inc., which develops parts for cyborgs.
”Her job is the role of a personal nurse to care for the Black Tempest, the black sheep of the family and the feared executive of the company,” said Ms. Chong, 32. “The story evolves around the world under the sea that went terribly wrong for Angel, who tries to help out her cyborg bosses with the best ability she could, but ended up getting involved in this Mafia-style cyborg family’s problem.”
Rendered in manga a cartoony, exaggerated style of art that originated in Japan and has spread throughout the world “E-Depth Angel” has a devoted following.
”What’s not to like about giant robots fighting?” said Elysse Breaux, who began reading “E-Depth Angel” online years ago and now helps color some of the pages and helps maintain the website. “The story and the art evolve over time, not hesitating to show different sides of our future world, including a diverse cast. There is something in it for everyone: action, drama, a hint of romance, a bit of horror, dash of humor and even mystery. It deals with humanity or rather loss of humanity for cyborgs and the struggle of those who are still human; it depicts an imperfect world with the delusion of paradise: false utopia vs. ignored dystopia.”
Ms. Chong is taking a break from posting new installments of the story. She’s focusing on developing the book into a choose-your-adventure video game for personal computers a skill she picked up at while studying for her bachelor’s of fine arts degree in animation at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
She’s hoping to bring Angel, Lien, Randy and the rest of the characters to life through animation. She’ll attempt to raise the capital through another crowd-funding campaign around March.
”If I get $20,000, it will be about 10 or 15 minutes long,” said Ms. Chong, who lives in Hillsborough with her parents, Tony and Tina. “If I get $40,000, it will be about 20 minutes long. If I get about $120,000, I can make it a full-length movie.”
For now, Ms. Chong is working hard to make ends meet. She attends manga shows, comic cons, craft shows anywhere where she might sell some copies of her comic. She does commissioned work for other artists. She’s even been known to do caricature work at kids parties.
She does it so she can continue creating “E-Depth Angel” and its “2Masters,” a series with overlapping characters.
”I see Mayshing’s work as full of earnest,” said Roxie Tran, who is a fan-turned-editor. “You can’t help but smile when you see her work. There’s always going to be stronger artists, but Mayshing stands out the most in her ability to always be dependable and has one of the best track records you can find in any freelance artist. . . You can never get bored with her work as she has something to appeal to everyone because of the many mediums she’s involved in.”
For information “”log on to http://comics.mayshing.com/edepth/ or http://altabestudio/.com/