I woke up at 6am yesterday and by 10am I was in Megamall to meet the guys. Lan Medina had emailed telling me he won't be able to make it because of deadlines. I know how THAT feels. I had to buy a black jacket first because Ruey De Vera, the guy from the Inquirer doing the interview said we needed to wear something black and honestly, I didn't really own anything I wore that was black, except perhaps for my socks. At Comic Quest Wilson Tortosa was already there. Wilson is probably one of the friendliest people you will ever meet, nuff said. We hung around waiting for Leinil Yu to arrive. Raquel, the store clerk told me that Wasted had run out again and asked me to bring in more copies. I'll bring another box next time I'm in Megamall. After Leinil arrives we head off to Powerbooks Pasay Road to meet up with Philip Tan, who by this time already met Ruey there. Together we all went up the Inquirer offices somewhere in Pasong Tamo. I can't remember how we got there for all the twists and turns we took.
The Inquirer had a building all on its own and I gotta say it was very interesting. The building has a HUGE staircase right in the middle going right up to the top floor with the offices surrounding it. We did the interview all of us at once and I was surprised at some of the things I heard. I dunno if it will make the interview but I came away from it knowing more about these 3 people than I knew before.
Next we did the photo shoot. Turns out I didn't need to buy a black jacket because Ruey had found black jackets for all of us to wear. To be honest, I was dreading this part of the interview because I really don't feel comfortable with set up pictures. You know, like I'm pretty sure the photographer was going to ask us to act like SUPERHEROES or something. Once I was asked to pose like Wolverine and I really didn't like it. It felt WEIRD. I'd much rather have my picture taken normal-like, you know? Before I realize what was happening, there we were, being asked to pose like SUPERHEROES!! It turns out the other guys didn't feel like it too, specially Leinil who was quite vocal about it. Specially because HE was asked to pose like Wolverine! Ha! Ha! Ha! I had it easy. I just had to stand there and look mean. Which really wasn't difficult because I know people out there who think I'm really mean anyway.
After the shoot wraps Ruey told us that the interview will come out this coming Sunday, October 5. Before we went, he took us on a tour of the building, which was VERY interesting because you get to see just how they go about creating a newspaper everyday. I had actually visited the Inquirer offices some 15 years ago, back when they were still at Intramuros. I was trying to break in as a comic strip writer and artist and I had been showing around my samples. There was one big difference between the offices then and the offices now. Today, it's much MUCH more silent. Because no one longer typed. On a TYPEWRITER. I asked if I could still apply for the comic strips and I was told that I could. Great! After that we all went for lunch because by then we were all very hungry, specially me since I haven't even had breakfast yet. After that all I wanted was to just go back home and sleep.
Back home I didn't sleep. I finished off my Inking Challenge for the INKWELL Yahoo Group where I inked a piece of fellow inker Aaron Sowd's pencilling. You can find Aaron's pencils here. And you can see how I inked it here. Here are a couple of pages where you can see all the pencils in the challenge and the inks done so far:
Inking Challenge Pencils
Inking Challenge Inks
