komiks

I second Jean's statement about Gerry Alanguilan's work! Fabulous stuff!

I remember going back to the Philippines and tex cards were all the rage. They were these 1" cards that had a comic book panel on them numbered. You had to collect the entire series in order to read the entire story. In the meantime, you played various games with them in order to "gain" the missing parts of the collection. ah, the memories.

While in college, I got hooked onto collecting "WetWorks," a comic about an elite military force who gets some gold symbiot coating and must fight werewolves and vampires. It was complex. But I collected it mostly for the Filipino character who did Filipino martial arts, was from Pampanga, part of an elite corp there and had absolutely the most luscious silky black hair. He even spoke a few lines of Tagalog here and there. However, once the symbiot got coated on him, it gave him what he wanted, to become pure energy, so his skin turned this neon blue and we never saw his dark eyes or skin again, though his luscious hair remained. I stopped collecting it after his character left somehow and the illustrators/writers changed.

Soon afterward, I started collecting, "Stone" which was a comicbook based on Filipino agimats, the magical stones. It was about this one guy's journey in collecting various agimats and how their powers combined. He often fought Philippine legends and mythology. Sadly, it began to come out more and more irregularly. But I always appreciated the effort to bring this storyline and these names to essentially a mainstream media. Stone, in particular, brought to the forefront a more complex story to these dark characters, which I enjoyed. And really breathtaking arwork!

I think comics fill in that part of Filipino communication that is non-verbal. The looks, the expressions, the gestures, something that takes too long to describe in words alone. As much as I spent learning the words of Tagalog, in travelling the Philippines, it's the non-verbal language of Filipinos that is more universal. How we speak volumes in a look or raised brow.