All of them vanished...without a trace...

There's nothing quite so delicious as a ghost story among friends. Smuggling in the food, lighting the candles, telling the tales...huddled in your sleeping bags afterwards, afraid to sleep...and then, sleep. A good scare for all, and no harm done.

Now imagine this magical experience inside a centuries-old boarding school in the middle of a dark, impenetrable Australian wilderness. And add lots of harm.

Greenwich Private College holds a terrible secret...and as twins Jeanie and Amber are about to learn, this is one place where "lights out" is held for a very good reason.

~Carol Fox, Editor

Jeanie and Amber Malkin are new students at Greenwich Private College, a boarding school in North Sydney that lies on the edge of vast, virgin bushlands. The school has a hundred-year history and is run entirely by its vice principal, who has a strange prejudice against identical twins. In fact, she rejects all twins' applications to the school. The girls were only able to get in by saying that they are just regular sisters, born 11 months apart.

After settling in and meeting new friends, the girls learn more about the school and its surrounding bushlands—which they are warned not to go into because, time and time again, young girls have wandered off into the bush and vanished...without a trace.

Few know how the girls disappeared...fewer yet know why. People lost in the bush don't simply die—they vanish, as if swallowed whole by the land. The twins heed the warning, but soon discover the reason so many girls have disappeared into the bush despite the warnings...and why the vice principal is so against identical twins studying at the school.

Queenie Chan:
She was born in 1980 in Hong Kong and migrated to Australia when she was six years old. As a child she read a lot of manga and watched a lot of anime, which was as popular in Hong Kong then as it is now. This bred in her a love of the medium from an early age.

After high school she enrolled in a 4-year Information Systems degree program—but the workload wasn't heavy, so she started drawing manga on the side. Still, she never considered it as a career until 2002, when she graduated right at the nadir of the dot-com bust and no companies were hiring. Her "big break" came in 2004, when TOKYOPOP began accepting international artists.

Check out Queenie's website at http://www.queeniechan.com/

Jeanie Malkin:
Very eager to be accepted by her peers, which sometimes leads her to make unwise choices and alienate her sister. Unlike Amber, she has a rebellious streak. But she is close to her sister, and both are willing to go to great lengths to rescue one another.

Amber Malkin:
Serious-minded, shy and reserved, Amber is unused to talking about what's bothering her—even to her sister. Amber is also very easily bothered by the supernatural and unexplained, and though she fights being pulled toward the dark forces that haunt her dreams, it's a losing battle.

Catherine Anu: (a teacher)
Jeanie originally dislikes her—she has the same patronizing, authoritarian tone the other teachers have. But Miss Anu is not mean of spirit, and as Jeanie discovers, always puts the welfare of the students first.

Mrs. Skeener: (vice principal)
Mrs. Skeener is a creepy old woman with old-fashioned ideas of how "young ladies" should behave. The teachers always bow to her commands, but few realize just how long she's been at the school...or how frightening her secrets really are.

From Animefringe

Currently set to hit stores in December, Queenie Chan's three-part tale The Dreaming marks the debut of Australian OEL manga from TOKYOPOP, and if the first volume is anything to go by, she will be doing a favor for her nation....

Set in dense bushlands somewhere in Australia, The Dreaming opens with twin sisters Amber and Jeanie moving from Sydney to a prestigious and very remote boarding school.... A variety of curiosities are thrown onto the table quite quickly as the tale begins to unfold, and various others trickle along as the pages keep on turning. Why did these twins have no choice but to come here? Why is it so important that the aunt who got them into the school lied, and said that they were born a year apart from each other? What are the rumors and superstitions that she mentioned? What is the overall concern of the Vice Principal? And why are Amber and Jeanie suffering recurring and identical dreams, dreams that seem uncomfortably connected to the school and its surroundings?

The overall pacing of the plot is well handled, revealing aspects of the story in a consistent and even-handed manner. It's very selective about what it does and doesn't reveal, making solid use of the different ways that the two girls see and respond to things. It's a story set in a closed-off world with an open bend towards horror, one that takes on a very ghostly and ethereal atmospheric approach, thus causing the story to work more with an uneasy vibe than with straight-out scares or gross-out scenes. It might be due to having a stretch of bush outside my window, but I found there to be a genuine uneasy and creepy feeling that came with reading this manga. Given that I've felt genuinely uneasy about twice in the past decade (as far as movies go), this is no small feat.

Hidden underneath the attractive and atmospherically accurate cover is a continued streak of solid illustration. Granted, the artwork isn't perfect, but it has a very strong grounding. It never feels incomplete, and it displays a high level of willingness to play with visual dynamics and perspective. The only flaws of particular significance were the odd moment of disproportion, and faces that often look as if they've been painted onto a flat (although shapely around the edges) surface, rather that being a fully bodied part of an actual, physical structure. Facial expressions are subtly expressive, however, and the visual depiction of the school is often mesmerizing. In fact, the walls and corridors of this building may be where the true expression in The Dreaming can be found, as a variety of different angles, atmospheric shots and gentle curved distortions convey the sense of suppressed menace much more effectively than any of the numerous eye close-ups. Detail abounds, and to top it all off, the usage of tones never skips a beat.

Outside of the immediately obvious illustration, the book also excels in its panel layouts, an important component as the panel layouts ultimately affect the overall lucidity of the reading experience. The panels are quite numerous, often flying over the top of each other, and they are laid out in a way that is generally quite effective at stimulating motion. This arrangement and focus on visual motion prevents the pages from becoming over-crowded with written text, and the overall reading experience flows more consistently because of it. The book closes off at a cliffhanger revelation that is also something of an epitome of the images as the driving force beyond the story flow and pacing.

Overall, this is a very strong entry into the professional manga scene, one that is well presented, effectively creepy at times, and one that actually has an ending in sight. The Dreaming is very easily recommended to almost anyone willing to read a non-Japanese manga, and particularly for those who appreciate a good comic design.

~Tim Henderson

Copyright © Animefringe

From IGN Comics

Dark fantasy manga from the Land Down Under.

"Queenie Chan has done a fine job of building up the sort of slow tension that you find in most of the good, mass market gothic horror novels.... Her artwork...has potential to not just be good but be scary good."

~KJB

Copyright © IGN Entertainment, Inc.