BACK HOME
Well, I'm back home. On the left is a picture of the apartment I left behind. I didn't leave it in that kind of mess of course. As you can see, it's plainly just a very long room, basically the setback of a residential house to the property wall less than 2 meters apart that had been enclosed by a roof. It was a very peculiar apartment mostly because it seemed like an afterthought. I had no TV, I had no fridge, I didn't have any cooking stuff (and I love to cook) and I didn't have my computer with me. I had the bed, a CD player/radio, a cooler that acted as a fridge and a bunch of comics, books and magazines to keep me company at night. I had resisted calling it "home" while I was living there. Not that I didn't like it, it's just that it wasn't really home. I was alone for most of the time and I wasn't even there most of the time. I was either out shooting or at Megamall meeting with Leinil for inking pages or just generally hanging out with friends.
On the right is Ilyn and me at the office of the United Architects of the Philippines here in San Pablo.
I took it myself that's why the camera is too close and too bright. Just before I took this pic I was outside opening the roll up door to the office when I noticed this dead RAT right beside me. It was all torn to pieces and I nearly puked. As if I wasn't disgusted enough, I saw its decapitated head staring right at me a couple of feet away. I really just lost it and went off in a stream of disgusted obscenities. I hate seeing dead animals on the street (but strangely enough I have no such aversion for the dead pigs and chickens I eat on a regular basis).
That is a SAMPALOC tree. I had always wanted to take pictures of one such tree. I had never realized it was so BIG. I spent the other day just taking lots of pictures of this tree from afar, up close, up the trunk, etc. I need it for a personal komiks project I am working on while I ink Superman. Since Superman is pretty much taking a lot of my working time, I'll be working on this Sampaloc project rather slowly, and might not see the light of day until middle of next year. I hope to finish it earlier.
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I've just seen the TV movie Anne Frank starring Ben Kingsley as Otto Frank, Anne's father, and Hannah Taylor Gordon as Anne Frank. It's probably the best screen version of Anne's story I've seen so far. It's very long at more than 3 hours, but it's a very detailed look at Anne's life before the Nazi invasion of Holland, to her and her family's self imposed exile into hiding, to her capture and eventual fate in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Although I have read the diary a couple of times, it was still harrowing to see it play before you on screen. Your heart really goes out to Anne and futile as it might be, you still think of ways of how you could have saved her.
The PINOY Tradition at the COMICS JOURNAL
Dirk Deppey of the Comics Journal got in touch with me not too long ago with regards to a Francisco Coching article on my site. He had been concerned that since it was an "Artist of the Month" feature, that I would delete the article at the end of October. I had to sheepishly admit that the "Artist of the Month" had already been hanging around there for several months already. ha! ha! And I was still writing the 2nd artist that I will feature, Alex Niño, which should be up this month. But the Coching article will remain there, as long as the site is up.
Anyway, Mr. Deppey wrote to me again today to say that he had written an article, not only on Coching but about my site, many other Pinoy Komiks artists, my thoughts on Culture Crash, and Pinoy Komiks in general. It's a very interesting article which takes an outside and unbiased look at the stuff I had looked upon so closely. Thanks to Mr. Deppey for writing the article. I hope it goes a long way in making people abroad more aware of Philippine comics, and specially of Mr. Francisco V. Coching, probably THE greatest Pinoy Komiks artist who ever lived (in my humble opinion of course), and probably the least known because he had never accepted work outside of the Philippines.
You can check out the article here:
http://www.tcj.com/journalista/
The article will stay there for 5 days before it is archived and is housed permanently in this address:
http://www.tcj.com/journalista/zarch200211A.html#pinoy
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