mababang langit

"ang maskot" @ sputnik comics, cubao expo you can't miss the store, it's melting. note the store hours: 4-10pm , closed on sundays

i don't do twitter, but this just killed me: via

bookstore clerk 1: hanapin mo sa youtube! bookstore clerk 2: wala daw yan sa youtube. bookstore clerk 3: hanapin mo na rin! bookstore clerk 1: type mo, "katrina". bookstore clerk 2: walang h! bookstore clerk 3: pwede na yan! all: aay, wala nga.

Fact: Most film festival programmers are interested in movies about the poor. They are less likely to invite comedies about middle-class Filipinos mulling over the meaning of life than dramas about the proletariat struggling to survive. So when your aunt in Tarzana, California or Slough, England complains, ‘Palagi na lang yan ang ipinapakita abroad! Puro mahirap, marumi, mabaho, wala man lang mall o Boracay. Baka akala nila lahat ng Pilipino ganyan (All the Filipino movies shown abroad show poverty, filth and squalor; foreigners will think we all live like that),’ explain the situation. jessica zafra nicely sums up the current condition and immediate foreseeable future of independent pinoy cinema here .

... with her bayong from dior.

if you read local blogs you've probably heard of the "great book blockade of 2009" (if not here's a good place to start, and there's a timeline here ). besides being outraged by the greed and temerity, etc. etc. i also have a kerascoet book that should have arrived weeks ago that i think is among the books being held by customs. so i thought i would try and do my part as a visual person, and made this: you can download the full editable file for free at my deviantart . use it for posters, signs, even merchandise, if you like. anything to help spread the message.

"ang maskot" is now available at stall 49, novelty village. look for the shop with replica guns displayed outside--it's along one of the upstairs rows fronting the pet stalls. price is P50 per copy, digest size, 52 pages. black and white. the owner, donald gonzales, is looking for more local/independent/self-published comics to put up for consignment at his shop . you can reach him at 0922-881-1618. thanks to heubert khan michael for blogging about mr. gonzales' shop.

you know the type. purveyors of false on-your-sleeve nationalism who make a freak show of themselves at the slightest perceived injury to "their" country's good name. they hijack conversations, spark media circuses, make a general nuisance of themselves. think desperate housewives. chip tsao. most recently, roger ebert . i tried to think of a dignified way to deal with these people without letting myself get dragged down to their level, failed, and finally decided to just drag them down to my level: paste this image in the appropriate message board, comment thread, blog, etc., wherever the Philippine Insecurity Force rears its pointy little head. you can also download the badge as a scalabe vector file here to use as you wish, commercial or otherwise.

so i tried doing the hourly comics thing at komikon... i cheated on the first couple of cartoons because i only got the idea at eight forty that morning. click on the image to embiggen if you can't read 'em. and also please excuse the poor scanning. if it helps, the originals didn't look much better :P the girl next to me was with i-north comics--they had like a hundred titles for sale and hogged all the table space. not that i hold it against them or anything. for the record, nakahanap ako ng tabo. it was not destined to be mine. here's the sketch i made of the little girl: what's wrong with it?! i made her look like a hayao miyazaki heroine fer cryin' out loud! yeesh. the guy was chapel from silent sanctum manga. he's a marketing geeeniuss! i finally got to walk around and buy stuff when cherry watched my table for me. she even continued the hourly comics! guess i should've told her abstract art doesn't count, though. he he (edit: cherry say...

it was my first time on the other side of the exhibition table, and i'm still a little high from the experience. whew! thanks to all the people who bought ang maskot , especially the folks who told their friends about it, or even better, came back later with a friend in tow, going, "that's the one i was telling you about," right in front of me, thus shaming the friend into buying a copy. you guys have a special place in my heart. at the 'kon i was thrilled to be able to talk to manila bulletin cartoonist norman isaac, who complimented my work and had many questions about being a DIY comics-maker. the versatile kc cordero also came by and bought a copy like he promised, and we got into a brief discussion on the use of an entirely black page as a transitional device. zero point comics creators michael david and jon zamar were my first two customers, for which i will be eternally grateful. they also sat across from our table, so, according to bearkdowns creator jose...

earlier i described my process for drawing my comic "ang maskot". you can read that here . so now i have all 48 pages done in individual adobe illustrator .ai files, and the next step is to get them ready for the photocopying shop. not having any desktop publishing software (and not knowing how to use 'em anyways), i did some common-sense improvisation: taking fourteen pieces of scratch paper, i folded them together in the middle to make a mock-up pamphlet, numbered the pages using a ballpen, and then took the pamphlet apart gain. now all i have to do is replicate the ordering of the pages on the sheets using the same program i started with, adobe illustrator. i open a new document 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches high in illustrator. based on the mockup's page numbering, i paste the two appropriate illustrator files onto the new document. here it's the front and back cover-- the outer face of the first sheet. i then arrange them by hand, leaving a bit of margin al...

five days to go before komikon! i made a crude sldeshow of my comics-making process for "ang maskot" described in my earlier post . but blogger doesn't seem to support flash animation, so i had to upload it to my deviantart . click here to see it.

this is a sample page from my self-published comic, "ang maskot", which i created entirely as vector art in adobe illustrator. the techniques i describe below were essentially made up as i bumbled along, so they may amuse and/or tick off any comics pros reading this. so let's start off with brainstorming. "ang maskot" began long ago with an overheard conversation about a friend who may or may not have dressed up as a mascot for a children's party--i'm a little fuzzy about the details. but eventually ideas started coming together in my head until one day i finally sat down and started drawing thumbnail sketches (if you can call 'em that): just quick scribbles on the cheap mini-intermediate pads i favor as scratch paper. plot, layouting, pacing, a smattering of dialogue... i lay things down so i won't forget later. and since i'm both writer and artist, the drawings only need to make sense to myself (but even there i've failed once or twic...