By: Kaja Antic, Staff Writer
Content warning: mentions of death and trauma.
For local freelance and comic artist Scarlet Wings Kaili (Kelly Chen), HalfSoul began as a project without much of a plan — one that has now continued for seven years.
“It actually started when I was in hospital and bored out of my mind. And I just wanted to make a short story, but it didn’t end up being short,” Kaili explained in an interview with The Peak.
The story revolves around a group of young adults working for the Halfsoul Extermination Association (HSEA), whose jobs are to kill “halfsouls” — those who traded half of their soul for a wish. Halfsouls have such a negative implication in this universe that the HSEA is a legal entity dedicated to their total annihilation. The four main characters — Tale, Nalia, Zach, and Scarlet — all have their own connections to halfsouls and the HSEA, along with personal challenges and traumas that are explored throughout their corresponding tales.
“Each book is through a different character’s perspective,” Kaili elaborated. “I wanted to give different challenges for them.”
Each book, consisting of three cases, focuses on a different member. Halfsoul: Zach, the third and most recently released instalment, focuses on Zach, the son of HSEA leaders. He struggles with coming to terms with his past, as well as how his upbringing has affected his sense of self, safety, and morality.
“I wanted him to have conflicts about what’s right and wrong, and also how your perception of what’s right and wrong is influenced by your upbringing and your parents, and what happens if you have dysfunctional families and how you can manage that.”
“Even though the series is fantasy, I put a lot of my own experiences in a way that I try to process it through fantasy.” — Scarlet Wings Kaili, HalfSoul comic artist
Much of the character arcs throughout HalfSoul revolve around mental health and the non-linear path to recovery within a fantasy setting. The dark ink on the comic pages deepens in the more emotional sequences, with Kaili’s details adding even more dimension to the complex story. Though the characters traverse this shadowy world drenched in darkness and smog, much of their experiences mirror Kaili’s experiences in real life.
They said creating the comic has “been quite hard because a lot of the content is also very emotional for me, so I also have had to take breaks and reprocess what I’m going through before starting again. Because even though the series is fantasy, I put a lot of my own experiences in a way that I try to process it through fantasy.”
Drawing on their style influences from manga, Kaili expanded their artistic flair as the comic went on. Expressive panelling, detailed backdrops, experimental layouts, and sharp contrasts add to the story as characters evolve through their respective yet overlapping journeys.
The grey areas between good and bad, the struggle for belonging from adolescence to adulthood, the eternal dilemma of nature versus nurture, and the internal struggles of dealing with mental illness bloom in the ink illustrating Zach and the HSEA unit’s stories.
“The entire story is very mental health-based.” Kaili said. “It’s really about the process of having a mental illness, how it’s not linear. And even though this book ends, the journey is still an ongoing idea.”
You can read HalfSoul online on Tapas.io to follow along as Zach’s journey continues, along with Kaili’s website, social media, and Twitch channel — where you may even be able to find them streaming while creating comics.
