mababang langit

dear marvel, please make this comic. thank you. via

so gma's news portal just started its first-ever webcomic, manix abrera's news hardcore . yay, right? mainstream media-supported webcomics. but then you notice that it's been filed under "home > nation > top stories". also it doesn't have its own rss feed for fans to subscribe to. it's like gmanews said, "webcomics, yeah whatevs, just slap that on anywhere." i am disappoint.

i am not the kind of guy who "likes" a lot of things on facebook.

mark rosario of planetmarkus.com posted a review of ang maskot on flipgeeks.com : very witty, hysterical and unexpectedly heartwarming all at the same time. It’s really not surprising why this title has received (and continues to receive) so much positive feedback from both comic fans and creators alike. The story itself is well-crafted plus the artwork is just pure eye candy. *earclaps* full article

lots of good stuff here: Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading By Ursula K. Le Guin Once you’ve pressed the on button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities. In those departments, beloved by the CEOs, a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. you know filipino comics have been misunderstood, underestimated and basically bo...

this morning in my facebook there was a post by julius villanueva about some animated gifs off of the scott pilgrim fighting game: THEN there was this poster for the jet city comic show in seattle. and THEN fellow sulyap-er tepai pascual drew this : okay, so the last one is an actual taal monster. but those other two... i gotta make more original character designs...

remember those? "The downfall of the old movie theatres also brought the end of companies making hand painted movie billboards. BM Sagmit which is located in Tondo is to my knowledge the only remaining company still making hand painted movie billboards." Nowadays most billboards are electronically printed on tarpaulin but the old cinemas can hardly afford them. They continue to ask for small hand painted billboards on canvas that are cheaper as after each use a new billboard is painted upon the old one." more here and here .

i am usually very, very skeptical about (i.e. i hate) "first filipino blank-and-blank movie!" anyone remember ang panday the animated series? what about isko: adventures in animasia ? yeah, those went really well didn't they. i can just imagine the boardroom meeting that spawned these ideas: "let's make it reeeaaaally filipino! let's have the hero wear a maglalatik costume! how many tikbalangs and manananggal can we squeeze in, do you think?" what makes rpg metanoia look so promising to me is that it is forward-looking rather than backward-looking. there's no hint so far of the false nostalgia and out-of-place nationalism that weighs down the earlier films. cg animation? 3D? avatars and rpg's? it's too hip to be true! and in a sense it is. the project was begun in 2004 by local studio thaumatrope, and abs-cbn only came aboard in 2008. so there is at least some chance that this will be legit. their website's pretty nifty, and of course th...

sulyap is a collection of short komiks stories published by the same people who bring you the komikon comics conventions. editor jon zamar did a great job of showcasing how diverse the pinoy indie komiks scene is nowadays: you've got manga, angsty autobiographical stuff, spandex-clad superheroes, straight-up cartoon stories, even a bit of parody kaiju and historical fiction. (my taal volcano monster vs. evil space paru-paro is among the works included) the cover was done by melvin calingo, aka taga-ilog of culture crash fame, and that's his rendition of the taal volcano monster up there. i was so stoked to see it. :D the book will be released on november 13 at komikon. convention price is P150, and after that it'll sell for P250. you can get updates via the sulyap facebook page . more about komikon here .