“The bittersweet experience of revisiting a place that once felt like home”: Mon Jajaja illustrates London

If you’ve ever been the unofficial tour guide on a group trip either from your wealth of local knowledge or a tendency to just be ‘the one that plans things’ then you’ll know that it can be a pretty exhausting venture. Illustrator Shimeng Jiang’s (aka Mon Jajaja’s) latest comic explores just that.

As a former Londoner, the creative recently made a trip back to the city with her friend and sister for a week, and took on the tricky role of balancing different travel dynamics, keeping everyone happy and stealing some ever-so precious time back to be alone along the way. Upon her return home, she found herself awake in the middle of the night from jet lag, left with the overwhelming urge to write down her thoughts from the trip and make a comic about the experience. Her resulting publication London focuses on “the messy realities of travel, friendship, and the art of being alone”, all in Shimeng’s soft observational style.

The comic started out with a few of the illustrator’s sketches from the trip and evolved with a few other visual libraries: “I hadn’t planned to make a comic back then, so I also relied on memory, photos, and even some pictures my friend shared with me,” she explains. Using watercolour and gouache in a wonderfully nostalgic manner with childlike brushstrokes, Shimeng experimented with each of the compositions before finalising the pages: “I wanted each page to feel organic, almost like an illustrated journal, unlike my older comics, where I drew each frame separately and arranged them digitally. This time, I composed the entire page together, allowing the frames to flow more naturally.”

Each illustration was really a way to look at London close-up, her focus being on the small everyday details of the trip that felt distinctly ‘London’ for her: “Autumn leaves in the park, the animals, the fresh smell of towels in the Airbnb, the robotic voice of the Tesco checkout machine, the patterned seat on the tube” – her pastel palette washing perpetually grey London scenes in full colour.

Among these visual postcards from her stay, a mix of introspective monologues and conversations between characters interject – the comic’s first page opens with a cab driver asking: “First time in London?” as our doorway into the story. For some moments, like this one, Shimeng doesn’t include an answer in the dialogue, sentences and thoughts hang in the air to leave room for the visuals and text to add depth to the storytelling. Some are more humorous extracts of audio like “clubcard accepted”, balancing the quiet of her introspective illustrations with a sense of humour that ties her to the city.

Playing with different perspectives across its pages to immerse the reader in a multifaceted experience of her travels, Shimeng hopes this blend of “humour, introspective monologues, and visual metaphors”, is indicative of a somewhat relatable mess: “the little tensions, misunderstandings, and unplanned moments that make travel both challenging and memorable.” This illustrated narrative was also, she concludes, a way for her to capture the “bittersweet experience of revisiting a place that once felt like home.”