The following is an abridged version of the foreword to the coffee table book The First One Hundred Years of Philippine Komiks and Cartoons that will be launched on October 16 in Powerbooks. Accompanying it is the cover for the hardboard (as differentiated from the jacket) titled "Rizal the Fanboy".
The idea to produce The First One Hundred Years of Philippine Komiks and Cartoons arose from my association with Dr. John A. Lent of Temple University who keeps telling people in comics forums all over the world that the Philippines has a rich tradition in cartoons and comics.
I also have been asked to deliver talks about the comics in our country in Malaysia and several times in China. In the process, like a professor prepping up for an inquisitive class, I had to dig deeper into what Lent has been saying about our comics wealth. And in that classic irony, the more I learned the less I knew.
Dr. Lent wrote “The First Seventy Five Years of Philippine Comics,” an article that appeared in 2004 in the US magazine The Comics Artist. Reading that piece made me a proud Pinoy and it inspired me to ask Lent to expand the article for a coffee table book, thereby affording us the opportunity to present a bigger gallery of the works that the topic richly deserves.
From the standpoint of a Filipino, telling you about the story of cartoons and comics in the Philippines is like rummaging through our family chests and making sure that whatever we unearth from them are something that we can be proud of or be richer with. We like to build myths. We like to construct diagrams of progeny. We like to be comforted in a cozy bed of heritage.
What is sure is that art forms may evolve through the visions and sensibilities of gifted men but their spectators validate and sustain them. Comics creation remains virulent not just because there are artists who cannot sleep not unless they can draw but because people as a whole need to put down their dreams on paper, so to speak. Drawings represent the aspirations of man.
The Philippines is a young country and may not have deep and complex history like Japan that has its emaki and kibyoshi dating back to the late 18th century, very readable materials replete with drawings that are said to be the forerunners of manga or comics. In 1821,we had Ilocano painter Esteban Villanueva depicting the Basi Revolt in vivid sequential paintings and, in some pieces, populated them like Malang’s Menagerie. But I guess those paintings, considered to be the first historical ones in Southeast Asia, do not count because they were not printed on paper and publicly disseminated.
When cartoons and comics were born in the country at the turn of the century, the populace was just beginning to read after being kept for years from the illumination of literacy. The American occupiers brought public education. They introduced Hollywood, a new way to look at Christianity, and a freer discourse. There was an explosion of expression that remains to be contained up to this day. The repressed exuberance of the Filipinos exhibited itself in politics, entertainment, and media.
The few comic books that American soldiers brought mutated in the Philippine soil. And a whole comics industry, nay, a whole cultural node was formed.
The First One Hundred Years of Philippine Komiks and Cartoons will trace the birth, the blossoming and withering, and - now we are saying - the rebirth of comics and political cartoons in the country. This book, we must qualify, is a work in progress. The diggings in the archives have yet to be completed. A living witness as I was of the development of comics in the country, I was not aware until recently of the extent of other attempts and forays of comics creators. Amassing all the outputs as we go along will, no doubt, confirm the rich heritage of comics in our hands. Above all, we pursued to do a book such as this to serve as a reminder that excellence can and should reside in us.
