Street where the bros live

By MARCUS STICKLEY


Ant Sang's studio is just big enough for its purpose. Favourite frames from past projects hang on the wall alongside pieces of inspiration. Characters from his latest project, Bro' Town, sit on a drawing board.

Opposite the drawing board is Sang's computer. He pulls up his finished work on the screen, introducing the characters he helped to turn from ideas into images.

Sang speaks softly. His newborn daughter is asleep in the room next door.

At 34, he has spent over a decade producing illustrations. Bread-and-butter work from government departments and charitable organisations support his personal projects.

Firehorse Films' producer Elizabeth Mitchell discovered Sang in the Herald, in a column about his self-published Dharma Punks series.

She bought his comics and asked him to apply for the job as designer of an animated series she was putting together with the creators of Naked Samoans.

Sang and seven other applicants were each given $100 and the design brief for Bro'Town, a TV series based around the lives of four 14-year-old Samoan boys and their Maori friend, growing up in the Auckland suburb of Morningside.

Although there were aspects of the other applicants' work she liked, Mitchell gravitated towards Sang. "There was something about the happiness of the characters. Endearing isn't quite the word - he just got it right," she says.

Sang is an observer. "He always adds these things in that you don't see until the fourth or fifth time," says Mitchell.

His work is filled with the little details you miss walking down the street, the poster plastered to the wall or the cafe sign standing on the pavement. They are the details that identify a city.

"For Bro' Town, I was looking around Williamson Ave, taking photos of buildings, cabbage trees, all that kind of stuff. Power poles, lamp posts, rubbish bins, trying to get the whole look of it."

Sang says the hardest part of the job was developing the lead characters and getting approval for the writers' teenage caricatures. "Oscar [Kightley] was the trickiest. He's got that prominent jaw that he's quite proud of."

The writers had firm ideas on other parts of the Bro' Town world, including the rugby field in heaven based on Carlaw Park where God kicks around with George Nepia.

Sang usually works alone in his studio. A smile flashes across his face as he talks about working with the production team, and the creative buzz of working on a project together.

A social commentary runs through his projects. "I guess all my work has been just trying to suss things out - whether it be society or whether it's myself."

Sang released the last issue of the eight-part Dharma Punks series two months before he started work on Bro' Town.

"Dharma Punks was based on certain things that happened in my life that I put on a tangent to characters."

Set in 1994, the series followed the life of an anarchist punk called Chopstick and his friends as they plotted to blow up Bobo's, a multinational fast food restaurant, on its opening day. Friendship, love and hate were explored.

"It was a really personal story and I didn't really worry about how much money I could make out of it. I was just hoping it could do well and that it would be a good comic at the same time."

Sang decided to publish Dharma Punks himself as a challenge as much as a necessity.

"I thought it would be a good way of seeing if I could actually do a comic which sustains itself over eight parts and which works as a graphic novel."

Comics are not viable for local publishers. Maui, illustrated by Chris Slane, is the only full-length graphic novel printed by an established publishing house in New Zealand, other than Murray Ball's Footrot Flats and Malcolm Evans' Edna.

Dharma Punks shone a light on New Zealand's fledgling comic industry and inspired a handful of marginalised artists to publish their own stories.

Now Sang is developing Dharma Punks into a feature length film with production company Haynes Film.

For Sang, comics are art, not commerce, but the need to earn a living weighs more heavily these days.

"As I'm getting on in years and have got a baby, it's more like, how do I balance the two?"

He is thinking more about the accessibility of his comics. His next idea is a kung fu street gang story set in ancient China after the sacking of the Shaolin Temple.

Sang talks about adding a commercial slant, but the quality of his craft is the most important end.

On screen

*Who: Ant Sang, Bro' Town designer

*Where and when: TV3, tonight 8pm