The Secret of the Seven Lakes
This is a comic book series I had originally planned on doing after I finish doing ELMER sometime next year. It's a series of stand-alone stories featuring a brother and sister teen team, Miko and Jec-Jec, and their dalmatian dog Eugene, and their adventures of danger and excitement all over the Philippines.
The first adventure, entitled "The Secret of the Seven Lakes" would take place in their hometown of San Pablo City, where the disappearance of a friend and their search for him lead them to discover clues that would unravel the greatest unknown secret in the history of the town: The Secret of the Seven Lakes.
Yes, it's an All-Ages comic book, something I've been wanting to do for a long time, specially after doing so many stories geared mostly for older readers. This is something I'm doing for the 8 year old me, as well as the 38 year old me, as well as the 88 year old me years and years into the future.
Ilyn had been doing some hardcore conceptualizing with me and this is as much a product of her creativity as it is mine. I've done sketches here and there, but no real artwork as of yet.
So when the opportunity arose only recently to be able to serialize Miko and Jec-Jec on a weekly basis for a national newspaper, I had no artwork at all at hand, but I thought I'd jump at the chance.
I had originally planned to publish "The Secret of the Seven Lakes" through Komikero Publishing as a complete stand alone comic book in full color next year. Full color meant a huge chunk out of an already suffering wallet, but I thought if I were to be serious about this publishing thing, I'd better go in with guns blazing. But it is a huge risk, specially for an unknown and untested property.
If this story does get accepted at the newspaper, I'd have the chance to introduce this story and these characters nationwide in full color, and get paid for it too. It's a great chance to test it, and see how it will do. I'd then have much greater security going into compiling it later on upon completion, knowing that there would be at least people who would know what this is.
I needed to push production of the story to this year just to do the artwork above, and hopefully, they like it enough to accept it. I'll be then doing this alongside ELMER, and HUMANIS REX!
Fingers crossed!
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Update on TIMAWA and Alamat ng Lawa ng Sampalok.
These stories were supposed to have seen publication around this time. But due to various circumstances I'm too tired to wade through here, it's temporarily on hold, much to my chagrin. I'm optimistic that this will still push through though. Timawa has waited 10 years, I suppose it could wait a little bit longer.
