Panel and Paragraph
I write (and occasionally draw) comics, a much-maligned and tragically misunderstood medium. Yes, medium. Specifically, I write komiks, our even more maligned, even less understood local subspecies. I work in words and images–not like in a storybook, where the latter merely decorates the former, but rather in such a way that the two become inextricably intertwined in a manner unique to comics. By dividing the space on the blank page into panels, I can simulate in the reader’s mind the passage of time. I can then fill these panels with any combination of written dialogue or description; or drawn imagery, gesture, facial expression, setting, light and darkness, point of view. A single image is my equivalent of a word. A panel, that’s a sentence. A set of panels on a page, a paragraph.
Many of the tools I have at my disposal come from cinema, others come from literature. I can favor one approach, or I can mix things up as I see fit. For this reason, the medium of comics is often thought of as an inferior hybrid of these two more respected artforms; a glorified storyboard, or a cheat by which children are taught to read. One of the things I hope to achieve with my work, and with my voice, is to address these misconceptions.
But I am not applying to join the UP National Komiks Workshop, so…
My comics share a common embryonic form with my short stories: the outline. Any of these outlines and scraps of ideas gestating within various notebooks, .txt files, and hastily-recorded voice memos, can develop words and grow into fiction, or they can sprout a sequence of images and blossom into a comic. I tend to write stories about Filipino life and culture told through a pop culture lens: a disgruntled fast food mascot getting stuck in his costume and going on the lam; a tourist-hating giant monster living in the depths of Taal Volcano; a morning school bus ride in a post-zombie pandemic “new normal” getting interrupted by, predictably enough, zombies. I try to look for humor and humanity in odd places and situations. If asked about the root source of these story ideas, I would say, probably childhood trauma.
I grew up in the early 80’s on a steady diet of Sesame Street and cartoons–which I watched when my parents weren’t around, that is, the whole day–and ultra-violent Hong Kong martial arts films that my father would play on the family Betamax machine when he got home. These weren’t Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee films, which would be Citizen Kane by comparison; these were low-budget, limb-lopping exploitation flicks set in ancient China. The kind with flying guillotines. What’s a flying guillotine, you say? Imagine an ornate box at the end of a chain. Your robe-clad, bushy-eyebrowed martial arts assailant throws the box onto your head, encasing it, and then blades shoot out of the bottom of the box, slicing through your neck. The martial artist then simply has to pull back the chain to retrieve a neatly-packaged head-in-a-box. That’s a flying guillotine. Six-year-old me was scared to tears, but at the same time had to admit: that was kinda cool. The juxtaposition of these two types of entertainment had a deep impact on my worldview and creative interests. To this day I am constantly exploring our capacity for violence on one hand, and on the other, the primary-colored optimism and Homeric dignity embodied by Kermit the Frog.
In my first year at a boys-only high school, my English grammar teacher, a stately, middle-aged Pilita Corrales type, warned us that girls our age expected stimulating conversation with boys about Shakespeare. None of us believed her, of course. But just in case, I started brushing up on these so-called classics. Over the next decade I discovered many of my literary heroes, such as Jules Verne, Ernest Hemingway, T.H. White, and John Steinbeck. On the comics side, I fell in love with MAD magazine, Yoshihiro Togashi, Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan stories. I kept reading bangketa komiks like Space Horror until they disappeared altogether.
After graduating college, I learned about the fledgling independent komiks scene that had sprung up to fill the void left by the closure of Atlas, the last remaining publisher of the classic komiks of my youth: Aliwan, Tagalog Klasiks, the aforementioned Space Horror, and so on. I’d heard that anyone could make comics now, comics about anything, using any style, now that there were no gatekeepers left. You simply hand-stapled photocopies of your comic book (we called them “ashcans” back then) and then sold directly to readers at events like Komikon. This was a very novel concept at the time. It was very do-it-yourself and very punk rock, and it all felt exciting as hell. The first time a customer laughed out loud while reading a comic book I’d made, it was pure heroin injected straight into the veins of my soul. I’ve been chasing that particular dragon ever since.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Macoy Tang is an independent komiks writer and illustrator. His short comic “Ang Maskot” was adapted into a short film that was screened at Cinemanila. His first graphic novel, “Aswang High,” was an official selection at the Philippine International Comics Festival. He lives with his family in Pampanga.
