CHINGU, Ch. 1 - Emotional Support Fox

The first chapter of my work-in-progress graphic novel.

The following story (scroll to the bottom) is Chapter 1 of a longer graphic novel project inspired by my beloved Korean rescue dog, Chingu, who I lost in the fall of 2023. The illustrated scene I’ve shared below first inhabited my mind many years ago, back when I was teaching English in rural South Korea. It was winter, and I was living through the aftermath of a relationship that had dragged itself deep into the snowy Korean countryside … to die. Isolated and deeply depressed, there were many days when it seemed that Chingu was the only light still shining out there.

During that long winter, neither sleep nor wakefulness came easily—I lived somewhere in between. At some point, while lying in bed amidst empty soju bottles and discarded food wrappers, a vision came to me. In it, Chingu was cooking us breakfast sometime in the middle of the night. As we sat down to eat at the low Korean table, he offered me life advice. This strange scene brought me comfort, and so I willed it into existence through a short experimental comic I created over a 24-hour period (a work I immediately put into a manila folder and filed away, never to be seen by other eyes).

Fast forward… mmm, maybe 15 years? That image never left me. As I’ve come to believe that these unborn ideas can damage the psyche, I took it upon myself to finally bring this one forth in some form I could share. I’d been taking notes on a larger story for years, so I had plenty of material once I sat down in earnest to get to work.

The story that took shape features Chingu as a guide for a thinly fictionalized version of myself as we journey through strange dream worlds. The full graphic novel is currently under construction, piece by piece, and I will post updates as they emerge from this rattly, squeaky (though well-oiled) old comics machine here.

Here is Emotional Support Fox, the first chapter of my work-in-progress (currently titled Chingu):