When Craig Au-yeung and I sat down to lunch in Zen in Pacific Place, there was a cockroach at our table. The waiters could not help noticing as it was not at all the sort of thing you usually got in this pristine-to-the-point-of-unmemorable restaurant.
Mind you, Cockroach, the quarterly comic book Au-yeung will launch on Tuesday, would have taken some ignoring as he wielded it over the table. It is big - tabloid newspaper-sized - and has the little beasties printed large all over its cover.
It is a bizarre product from the well-known Hong Kong DJ, artist and columnist: he does not like the insects and grimaced as he said it. But he is collaborating with 20 local artists from many fields to bring out the comic here and in Japan, Britain, Taiwan and, most unlikely of venues, Paris.
Maybe the unsavoury nature of our meeting was the reason the restaurant's staff stuck us in a freezing wilderness, right at the back of the room in a tiny corner, despite a number of better, empty tables, which would have let us look out on the bustle of Pacific Place. Cooking smells accumulated there, to be soaked up by our clothing.
But Au-yeung, who was extremely charming company, said the 'not-up-to-the-minute' interior design reminded him of how the upmarket Chinese restaurant was the first of its kind when it opened five years ago, and scuttled straight back to his favourite subject as we ordered.
'Do you realise they are three billion years old, older than dinosaurs? They're like me, like alternative artists. We're pushed into corners and told we're not commercial, too. But we do have something to say. We have survival techniques and flexibility, too.' As jasmine tea arrived - to be swiftly followed by gawping waiters bearing endless dim sum - Au-yeung, creator of Craig's Comix and a fixture in Hong Kong's alternative comic scene for the past decade, said the idea started a few months ago at an exhibition at Broadway Cinematheque, when he and fellow artist Li Chi-tak produced 20 panels of artwork and a little pamphlet to go with it.
