My Husband Is A Gentleman.So, after the wonderful SHANGHAI COMIC CONVENTION, our hosts hired a...

My Husband Is A Gentleman.

So, after the wonderful SHANGHAI COMIC CONVENTION, our hosts hired a guide, a driver and a van, to take us to see a Chinese Water Town, these are beautiful villages where canals run through the middle of the town and boats, similar to gondolas in Venice, take people through the town and you see the gorgeous scenery. Our host was the lovely Erin Kang, who is so wonderful I can’t stand it. I am going to miss her terribly.

We went with some Erin’s assistant, and a Korean comics creator, and her interpreter. When we got out in Zhouzhang (I think that’s the spelling), it was pouring rain, and the female artist was wearing only a very thin blouse and shorts, she was freezing and it was pouring rain.

We hadn’t met them yet, they came up in a separate van. My hubby is the kind of guy who would never let this happen, so he offered her, through the interpreter, his jacket. She shyly accepted and he immediately gave her his jacket without a second though despite the pouring rain. I am used to this kind of thing, RocketSpouse is always the first guy to help and he never makes a big deal of it, it’s just who he is.

So he got a little soaked and his jacket was huge on her but she didn’t freeze in the rain (we’re from Oregon and are used to rain).

Later, we found out that the artist (who was very lovely and sweet), is very very famous in Korea. She created a manwha series called GOONG that became two very popular television dramas, I believe. As we sat down to lunch, she took out some of her art that she had with her, and she drew an adorable panda-like creature (from her book, maybe?), and wrote, “To Scott, thank you for the jacket, SO WARM” and gave it to us. Her name is Park So-Hee, and again, I hope I am spelling it right…I want to read this book! 

It was in this little restaurant over the canal, where we had the best food, impossibly good Chinese cuisine, one of the best meals of my life. Then we rode the boats while the oarsman sang.

I feel so ridiculously privileged to get to experience these things. Meeting hundreds and hundreds of Shanghai readers, the vast majority of whom were female, and knowing so many of them want to make their own comics…and then sitting and having fresh, delicious foods with such a gifted artist from Korea, whom I would never meet otherwise.

I love comics, I love the art of it, and I love the art is had brought to my life.