Monsters assembled from the severed limbs of its victims, humans riding flying cats, and planet-eating entities. These are the types of characters that inhabit the mind of Taiwanese comic artist Huang Liang-Chun, better known by his alias Karmarket. He’s an artist unafraid to explore the deep recesses of his mind, those dark corners of horror we usually strive to avoid. But he consciously gives his stories emotional breadth and meaningful depth. It’s also frequently infused with his own signature brand of humor.
残臂断足、飞猫坐骑、舔舐星球的庞然巨物——这些猎奇元素均来自台湾漫画家 Huang Liang-Chun（又名 Karmarket，藥島）的内心深处。对此，他毫不避讳，直面那些人们避之不及的黑暗角落。与此同时，他的作品丝毫不缺乏内容的深度与宽度，很多时候还会以意想不到的幽默感公示于众。
"There's a burning smell."
"I can feel the heat."
Huang writes and draws all his comics, drawing inspiration from dreams and daydreams alike. His first comic, “Somewhere On Fire,” was inspired by photos he took of local street food vendors. It started as three standalone illustrations, but due to the inspiration of a surreal Japanese manga, he developed a full comic out of the scenes. It became an outlandish story about a man who sees smoke in the distance and jumps onto a flying cat to go to the rescue, only to discover the smoke is actually just steam from a restaurant. So instead, he just sits down and orders food.
“It doesn’t really have a clear plot or make much sense,” Huang laughs.” “I wanted to draw people eating street food and it grew into this.” At the end of the comic, news of a real fire is broadcast on television and the hero looks on, depressed. It’s a helplessness that mirrors Huang’s own feelings when watching the news.
从故事到绘画，所有创作均由藥島一人包揽。梦境、胡思乱想是他的灵感来源。他的第一部漫画《某处起火了》，其灵感来自当地小吃摊贩。漫画起初仅由三幅独立插图构成，后来在受到一部日本超现实漫画启发后，他决定将这个离奇的故事讲述完整：一个男人感受到不远的烧焦味，决然跳上飞猫前去救援，结果发现眼前的浓烟不过是餐厅里冒出的蒸汽，于是他竟索性坐下来点餐。
“这部漫画其实没有明确的情节，也没有特别的意义，” 藥島笑着说道，“只是想画一些在路边摊吃饭的人，画着画着没想到却画出故事感来。”漫画结尾，电视上播出真正的火灾新闻，看到新闻后，男人痛哭流涕、一副郁闷的表情。而这种无助感也是藥島自己在看到这类新闻时的内心独白。
"I'm here to help!"
Since that first comic, Huang has completed two others. All are drawn in the same style, strictly black and white with an almost pointillist shading technique. “I’m a little color blind and my college professor told me my color sense is terrible,” he chuckles. “I was using a brush tip pen in high school, then used a fine tip, and when I switched to digital I continued the style.”
第一部漫画之后，藥島又完成了另外两部作品。所有作品遵循一致的绘画风格，只有黑白两色，并采用了类似的点绘手法。“我有点色盲，我的大学教授说我对颜色的感觉糟糕透了，”他笑着说，“我在高中时用的是软头笔，后来又改用细头笔，后来又运用数字创作，一直延续着这种风格。”
"They're everywhere. It's revolting."
"I thought I could escape these entities in space and find my peace."
"I was mistaken. Wrong to a shocking degree."
“Mir spacecraft MS01 has docked at 8.20pm. Welcome aboard."
"Finally making it to space..."
“Ghosts From Outer Space” drills deeper into feelings of despair and horror. In one panel, a giant, blob-like monster growing out of the Earth with tentacles that eat up ghosts in space. Circular orbs glom onto each other, creating the shape of growing tendrils the stretch into the exosphere, which is packed with the white silhouettes of ghosts floating aimlessly in orbit. This illustration was the comic’s initial inspiration. Huang had drawn it for fun and decided to expand it into a full story afterward. “I was having trouble explaining to people what the drawing was about, so I created a whole story to back it up.”
作品《宇宙的幽灵》表达了绝望与恐惧的深层感受。其灵感最初来自一张克苏鲁意味的概念作品：一个由数个球状体组成的怪物从地表冒出。球状体相互粘连，生长出漫无边界的触手，伸向外大气层外，那里漂浮无数个白色幽灵。藥島出于好玩画下了这幅作品，之后决定将其扩展成一个完整的故事。
"I supposed this is what people call heaven."
"Mom left and went to heaven."
"Yup. Heaven is right above us, so if you miss her, just look up..."
"Mom? What are you doing here!"
"Mom!"
"Why did you leave me by myself?"
"Growing up, I saw so many spirits, but I never saw you. I miss you so much."
"At that moment, from the abyss of the galaxy, something crawled out of the darkness."
It’s the story of a woman who’s been haunted by spirits her whole life—their mangled, tortured bodies present at every waking moment. She joins NASA to escape from it all, hoping the vacuum of space will offer peace and quiet. Instead, she finds the entire history of human kind on Earth in orbit, including her mother. Then the blob grows into space eating the ghosts, mom and all. Her fellow astronauts can’t see the ghosts and think she’s gone insane, so they send her back to Earth, where babies start being born dead without souls.
故事讲述了一位生来被鬼魂缠身的女子，只要她睁开双眼，就能看到亡灵那残缺不全、饱受折磨的身体。为了逃避这一切，她加入 NASA，希望在宇宙里能重新找回生活的平静。然而事与愿违，在宇宙里，她却看到地球上死去的人类，化作幽灵漂浮在太空。她看到球状怪物将触手伸向这些这些亡灵，那其中有她曾去世的母亲。其他宇航员观察女人的一举一动，断定她是疯了，并将其送回地球。从那之后，地球上发生了怪事：只要是婴儿，一出生便消失的无影无踪。
"Maybe it's because of earth's gravity, or interference from the planet's atmosphere, I've never seen anything like this. But in space... it's clear as day."
"What is it?..."
"What does it want? Why is it devouring human souls? Where did it come from? I had no answers."
"My crew mates became worried about me. We trained together and underwent pre-flight therapy together, why was I the only one so out of it? I don't blame them. They're lucky that they don't see what I see."
"In the end, command sent me back down to earth. And you know the rest."
"It doesn't matter what you believe. I'm not going back."
"In recent days, an unexplained disease has seemingly spread around the world that's affecting all newborns."
"They're seemingly without conscious. They don't cry or move. It's like they have no souls. There's no medical explanation."
For “Phantom Limb,” Liang-Chun wanted to draw a full-fledged horror story. Although it’s pretty gruesome, full of blood and guts, it’s also about coming to terms with trauma. A man who’s been hospitalized with a lost limb after a car accident sees visions of monsters made from other people’s body parts. In the hero’s dream, he feels the soft and tender wet grass on his missing foot and wakes up happy. Originally, Liang-Chun just wanted to draw a bunch of hacked off limbs but added the deeper themes after getting that part out of his system.
接下来的这部《幻肢》漫画则充满血腥和重口味元素，同时探讨了创伤应对的话题。医院里，一名因车祸失去右脚的男子瘫倒在病床上，脑海中，他看到一只由残肢断臂拼成的怪物。幻觉的同时，他缺失那只脚却真实感受到了潮湿柔软的草地的触感，这让他欣喜不已。这部作品的雏形，来自藥島在稿纸上乱画的残肢，后来在不断完善的过程中，增加了整部作品的深度和情感。
"But it wasn't just my foot."
All of Huang’s comics are available on the Creative Comic Collection website, a government-sponsored comics portal. He printed a couple of them before working with CCC, but readers will have to wait for the rest to be published. He says they’ve approved ten stories, which he expects to be published in about a year. “The government pays me to draw,” he smiles. “I won’t be rich or anything but I get paid to draw what I want.”
现在，藥島的所有漫画都可以在 Creative Comic Collection 网站上找到，这是一个当地政府赞助的漫画网站。其中一部分漫画现已印刷出版，还有些作品将很快已纸质形式和读者见面。他表示，其中十个故事已经通过审批，预计将在一年左右出版。他笑着说道：“政府出钱让我画画。虽然我不会因此变得富有，但我可以靠画自己想画的作品获得报酬。”
"The grass cut into my soles, and the soft mud with the mushy leaves felt wet and soft."
"It felt as if I were a kid again, running through the backyard. No direction and no destination—just freedom."
Huang’s work delves into dark themes, with gore and destruction always a page away. Even when it’s just a scene of restaurant patrons enjoying tasty noodles, it looks ghastly and dangerous. Massive spreads of ghouls and blazing fires are regular. They’re fantastical stories, happy to explore unreal worlds with flying creatures and blurred lines between the living and the dead. But he always strives to bring a human element to his tales, something that speaks truth to our souls. His characters deal with trauma, whether that be the death of a loved one or a life-changing accident. Some find peace and others don’t, much like the real world. It’s a balance that lets readers escape but also keeps them thinking.
藥島的作品以一种意想不到的方式探讨黑暗主题。即使只是顾客在餐厅享用美味面条的场景，也可以看起来格外可怖和危险，巨型的食尸鬼和熊熊燃烧的大火更是时常可见。这些异想天开的故事探索着生与死的界限。与此同时，他总是努力在作品中加入对人性的探讨，一些能与我们的灵魂产生共鸣的故事：从亲人离世到改变人生的事故，他笔下的角色遭受了各种创伤。有的人重拾了内心的宁静，有的人却没有，这就正如现实世界一样。这种平衡一方面为读者提供了逃离现实的空间，同时又能启发他们思考现实与想象的冲突。
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Contributor: Mike Steyels
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li
