On June 29th, 2017, I was working hard to get ready for our first public event, a book launch at Desert Island Comics. It was a rush to get the books done, make a functional website, and put the word out on Tumblr.
In the year and a half since, Paradise Systems has grown a lot! We’ve tabled at seven book fairs, hosted events in New York and Beijing, and, most importantly, published six more books!
My name is Orion Martin, and I have worked very hard to make this happen. But it would have been impossible without the work of many people besides me. Shannon Finnegan continues to offer a great deal of logistical, editorial, and design support. Gabe Loeb has helped build our websites and consults on design. Joey Schwartzman has provided translation feedback on many of the books. And all of the authors we work with have generously given their time and energy to make the books come out as well as they have.
Today I am very excited to announce that we are bringing on someone in a more formal role. Hong Kong-based designer and cartoonist Jason Li will be our newest editor! Jason’s work first caught my attention for his series of Chinese comics reviews, summarizing comics that had little or nothing written about them in English. I then discovered that he is an accomplished cartoonist himself. He has been long been working on The House on Horse Mountain, a graphic novel about growing up in 1960s Hong Kong, and also runs Add Oil Comics, a series that adapts newsworthy posts about important causes in order to reach a wider audience. When not making comics, Jason works in the field of information security (his TL;DR Guide to Personal Digital Security is a fantastic resource!).
When I posted on Tumblr about our 2017 launch event, the post got one like and one reblog, both from Jason. I truly appreciate his support through the past years and look forward to working with him on more exciting books.