From the journals…

It’s the year 2000, and I am making a war movie with thirty-nine high school classmates. We are filming in Video8.  The closest thing we have to digital are the crappy ten-second clips our phones can swallow before choking.  The boys are making a movie about killing each other, and I’ve got a camera.Directing is a funny thing.  The designated literati have gifted me and my cut crew with a face full of script while we manually record gunfire exchange from Saving Private Ryan.  Someone presents the idea of ripping the sound off of Counter-Strike games, someone sees through it and reminds everyone how tight of a deadline we have.

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We caravan to the woods up a mountain, as well as down south to film in a beach.  Ralph has a lame battle cry.  Andy throws a molotov cocktail.  Raymond stabs Julius in his styrofoam chest.  Alfred serves us water when we create the UN.  I kill George.  Forty people.  Forty credits.

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Filming ends with urban battles shot at the campus on a lonely Saturday afternoon.  The light is yellow.  It is quiet today, and my skeleton crew is smiling for the approaching end to the project and a good day’s work, equally.  We made something today.  For all our bickering and bullshit, we finished something with all our names on the best-before seal.  School is out in a couple of months and we’re all off to college.  Different colleges.

Someone nameless kicks the knob off our classroom door.

I keep it.

Downtown Cebu at Dawn

It’s easy to get lost in the tumult of polished and finished art sometimes, which might be why I like the grit and visual noise of street photography.  Urban soul-stealing, one might say.  Carlo Villarica has been a good friend of mine for as long as cutting class has been fashionable.  He plays guitar for a band called Rescue a Hero and makes us stare at street signs a little longer.  You can view more of his work here.

Almost ten years back, when I was still in college, I somehow got it in my head that a snotty little punk with animal powers would make for an amusing read.  Because I had been involved with local comic movements that had then just hung up their hats, I needed an outlet to at least keep the juices flowing.  BEAST BOY JOE was a semi-autobiographical comic which drew a lot from my days in UP.  It was a personal project that I had drawn up to 66 pages for (with script assists by my good friend Eric Menguito), but none of it ever saw print… mainly because it was really something intended just for me…  but also because I had no clue who would want to publish it.

Earlier this year, manly men Rey Siasar and Tom Perez from Big Ape Design approached me and asked if I had any material I wanted to develop into actual titles, and I jumped at the chance to resurrect Joe and hopefully finish the story.  I’ve been redoing  the dialogue since June, on and off, as my other projects remain top priority, but issue number one looks like it may very well be ready for the Cebu Comicon this September 25th.  The book will still have the same art from all those years ago, with touch-ups here and there, but with an all-new script, so as to update the jokes and shit.

Simply retitled THE URBAN ANIMAL, my pop-culture mash-up description for it would be The Catcher in the Rye meets The Incredible Hulk.  With some Archie thrown in.  It’s a 4-issue black-and-white original graphic novel that’s literally just been waiting almost ten years to get published — a fun little romp I can’t wait to violate you people with.  Give me money for it.

identity. theft.

identity. crisis.