The SHHAN
How does a conflict change depending on whose perspective we see it from?
The SHHAN builds an imagined world around White Cats, a physically fragile but extraordinarily intelligent people; Black Cats, powerful black cats; and Witch, an outsider who falls into their world. Comic-book covers, brief narratives and scene-based artworks unfold its civilizations, conflicts, legends and encounters, exploring how relationships change depending on whose perspective we follow.
The SHHAN is a worldbuilding project rooted in SHHAN’s childhood love of American comics, Japanese manga and animation. Beyond the appearance of its characters, he imagined different bodies and senses, civilizations and histories, and the conflicts that arise between them.
One way into this world is a set of six issues of a comic book that does not otherwise exist. Instead of drawing every page of a finished comic, SHHAN created a cover and a short narrative for each issue, extending the world through separate artworks. Viewers follow the gaps between images and stories to imagine what lies beyond them.
These six comic-book covers were issued as NFTs on Ethereum in 2022. The release comprises the six covers, not the fictional world as a whole. The enlarged view preserves the stories as originally published, alongside localized reading versions.
Comic-cover release records ↗At its center are White Cats, a white feline people, and Black Cats, beastlike black cats. White Cats are born with frail bodies; after one or two years, their eyes deteriorate and they lose their sight. They are also conceived as exceptionally intelligent beings with highly developed hearing, reflected in their long ears. Black Cats, by contrast, have large, powerful bodies.
Episode #1, Confrontation, begins with the longstanding conflict between these very different conditions of life. A fragile body does not, however, mean a powerless civilization. White Cats build organized communities and an army, finding other ways to extend their physical capabilities.
Their invention is the Dummy. A being akin to a living robot, one Dummy is assigned to each White Cat. Moving through communion with its partner, it becomes that White Cat’s eyes and strong body. White Cats ride Dummies into battle and use them for tasks requiring strength and labor. A Dummy is both a weapon and another body that makes everyday life and civilization possible.
In Episode #2, Capture It, soldiers discovering a Black Cat in the northwestern forest report their intention to kill it, but are ordered to capture it alive. Episode #3, Dummy, reveals how White Cats extend their senses and strength through a body linked to them. The conflict reaches beyond combat into captivity and research, bodies and technology.
At first this seems to be a story of White Cats struggling to survive powerful Black Cats. Episode #4, Survival, recounts how one enormous black cat brought White Cats close to extinction a hundred years earlier. Subsequent generations were born with various physical impairments, prompting White Cats to capture and study Black Cats in an effort to overcome them.
Episode #5, Aggression, uncovers an older history. Before that immense being appeared, White Cats had arrived on the planet from elsewhere, plundered its resources and brutally hunted its native Black Cats. Before the catastrophe White Cats remember, the other side had already experienced invasion and violence.
Who appears to be the aggressor or the victim depends on where the story begins and whose memories it follows. An act of survival can be violence to another being. A people with vulnerable bodies can wield overwhelming power through organization and technology. The SHHAN makes it difficult to judge either side by visible strength or weakness alone.
Episode #6, Their Queen, turns inward to White Cats society: a matriarchal monarchy ruled by an absolute queen. The civilization built through collective organization and technology also contains its own structures of power and hierarchy.
A legendary being, rarely seen, inhabits this history. The immense black cat on the first cover is Shhan. Black Cats names the people; Shhan names one colossal, legendary being among them. The memory of that being, recorded in the comics, endures in this world as both terror and legend.
The key to awakening this legend is a human girl, Witch. Having fallen into this world for an unexplained reason, she belongs to neither White Cats nor Black Cats. She travels with a Black Cat she meets there. Their bond is less one of taming or command than of different beings moving through the world together.
Witch was conceived as someone who, through an event, summons the legendary Shhan and undergoes an awakening herself. The battle artworks give visual form to this awakening and conflict. Her arrival and the precise event that awakens the legend were never fixed as a complete plot. She remains a mysterious presence with the potential to change the old order between the two peoples.
In the scenes that follow, the clash between immense Shhan and Dummies again reverses the scale of body and technology. Rather than consecutive comic pages establishing a definitive sequence of events, these images suggest how the world might change when legend appears within it.
Beings created here later developed into other projects. The girl and black cat’s companionship became a series exploring their relationship in Witch, while the immense black cat became an independent subject beyond the story in Shhan.
Snow Shhans is not a sequel set in this world. Conceived as a follow-up project after the success of Mimic Shhans, it drew on the earlier White Cats concept to develop something separate. Shared names and visual ideas do not make these projects one continuous fictional universe.
The SHHAN is not a story contained by six covers. It is an act of building a world by giving different beings bodies and civilizations, memories and legends. Between images that leave events unexplained, viewers imagine that world and reconsider earlier judgments as new clues emerge.
How does a conflict change depending on whose eyes we see it through? Through the histories of two peoples and the outsider who enters their world, The SHHAN asks how much remains unseen in relationships that initially appear clear.