mababang langit

it would be difficult to overstate the effect sir gerry has had on today's pinoy comic book industry. he was uniquely suited to act as a guiding (if curmudgeonly) voice for pinoy komiks during its troubled transition from the old bangketa model to the dynamic multi-outlet market we have today. through his influential blog , message board (the now-defunct PKMB), and personal connections here and abroad, he helped gather around him the generation of komiks creators that would establish the "indie komiks" scene. a lot of people talked about reviving pinoy komiks back then, but i don't think anyone did more to actually bring that dream about than sir gerry. i stopped making komiks several years ago, and one of my last purchases at the time was this: inside were autobiographical stories about a couple of stray dogs he adopted and how one fell ill and died, and about how sir gerry first learned that his kidneys had begun to fail, the crisis that stemmed from that,...

aside from costello and vergara's  ang maskot short film, there's also a group of DLSU students turning the first issue of trese, murder on balete drive , into a short film . and then there's that mysterious letter gerry alanguilan received from peter jackson's wingnut films...

sputnik comics shop recently released its top 5 indie sales lists for all the months of 2010 but december, and i am happy to report that each of my comics made it to at least one of those lists. the overall champ was louie cordero's nardong tae #1, which topped the charts for four out of eleven months. if this and alamat ng panget didn't keep running out of stock there wouldn't be any other titles at the #1 spot at all. as it is, alamat and my school run each hit #1 thrice. luckily for me, the ranking was based on number of units sold rather than peso sales, because, well, my stuff is cheap. major props to chez santander and the rest of the sputnik gang for compiling and releasing these lists, on top of all the other ways they've supported indie comics through the years. mabuhay kayo! sputnik on facebook