underpass by gerry alanguilan, david hontiveros, budjette tan, oliver pulumbarit, ian sta maria, kajo baldisimo

How I got it…
Through a monito-monita Christmas gift-giving; thanks Mommy Doc Cecille!

Why I read it…
Trese reminded me that I used to love comics. I wanted to see if I will also enjoy other authors and illustrators from the current crop.

What’s the story?
Is it a glossy magazine? An anthology of edgy music trivia and lyrics? Nah, it’s a collection of four horror stories set in Metro Manila.

In Gerry Alanguilan’s The Sim, a man picks up a SIM card. After inserting it in his cellphone, he receives frantic calls for help. The illustration takes me back to the time newsprint komiks were the vogue in my Manila neighborhood.

In Judas Kiss by David Hontiveros, Budjette Tan, and Oliver Pulumbarit, a murderer has more than murder on his conscience… I think. Very angsty. From purple to green to red to blue to red, the colors added to the visceral impact of the story.

In Katumbas by Hontiveros and Ian Sta Maria, Kadasig is a myth in a shirtless, sword-wielding, muscled warrior form. He hunts a demon who preys on the despair of pedestrians passing through one of Ayala Avenue’s underpass. The drawings were very right for this action story.

In The Clinic, Tan and Baldisimo found another way to place the monsters in our grandmothers’s tales right in the middle of our beloved pop culture icons, like a beauty clinic—staffed by manananggals! Clever of the manananggal, I should think. Who says scary half-women who fly on batlike wings, trailing entrails, wouldn’t have business sense?

Another condenado might be living in the underpass in Ayala. Maybe I should jaywalk until I’m over my funk?

What I liked about it…
The cover. It looks like a Silent Hill version of an underpass. That light at the end of the tunnel? Avoid it. It’s  scarier than the dark.

The inversion of our hopes and dreams. In my nightmares, God becomes helpless. In this collection, having hope is senseless. The night terrors are part of the living world.

So what’s to like about that? If I read a horror story, I want to be horrified, duh.

What I didn’t like about it…
I still would have enjoyed these stories even if they were on newsprint. Reading comics these days is so expensive. But then, maybe my grievance has more to do with my own lack of proper respect for graphic novels, as I hardly bat an eye these days spending up to 2K on my book hauls from Fully Booked.

Short stories are nice, but I prefer series. I’d love to see more of Kadasig’s exploits.

para kay b by ricky lee

Me quota daw ang pagibig. For every five, only one will triumph in love.

Pero sa tingin ko, Irene should just have used Ponds, for that rosy white complexion. Maybe she just got too tanned for Jordan to remember her right away? I think she’s also a victim of her own superiority complex, dismissive of the fact that not everyone has her photographic memory. Buti nga na minumulto sya ng nanay niya.

At si Sandra at Lupe naman. Hay naku! I think they must have been reading too much VC Andrews that it turned their heads around. So their world turned upside down. This is a warning to all parents out there to watch what their kids are reading. Check out what I’ve been reading—see how normal I turned out to be…

Then there’s Erica, from romance-challenged Maldiaga, seeking true love, but ended up becoming the heroine of her own tear-jerker telenovela. I pity her, yet I also admire her (pero may palagay ako, madi-disappont din sya if her story turned out to be bland and ordinary).  No half-measures, ‘di ba dapat? Dapat sure—at nanood na lang sana sya ng cartoons.

‘Eto namang kwento ni Ester. Bastus! Bastus yung asawa ni Sara. How dare he get well?! At nagpakalalaki pa siya. Poor move. If he had turned gay, maybe he would have had a better chance of making his wife fall in love with him. Eh, di sana, nag-iinuman sila ng kape ni Ester, Sara, at AJ together.

Brenda? What about her? Ughs, don’t wanna waste more words on her than I have to. Que pokpok na babae. Hindi naman in-love talaga sa kanya si Lucas—only with the idealized Brenda; his grief was not because she didn’t love him back. It was because real life did not bend to his delusions, hmp!

Anim na chapters lang ang Para Kay B. The sixth chapter is supposed to reel in all the loose threads, tie all the missing elements together. Ganun? Kaya ba labo-labo ang mga eksena, nakakaloka?

Sa totoo lang, hindi ko ma-gets yung last chapter. Postmodern technique daw ito, a literary technique that defies conventions and violates the rules of structure… The book is also some sort of metafiction, say reviewers. Naku, hindi ko talaga gets.

Ah, basta, whatever it is, it semed to have worked; at least, for my college-age sister it did. She says, echoing Ricky Lee’s explanation of his writing devices, “yung limang kwento, parang fairy-tale… exag… pero dahil sa kwento ni Lucas, naging parang totoong buhay.”

She must have liked the book; she didn’t budge from her chair until she finished it. Ako naman, nagustuhan ko ba? Oo naman—may temporary insanity ako nun, eh.

Pero wala kina Irene, Sandra, Erica, Ester, at B#*@#^!! ang paborito ko.  Para sa akin, para kay B ay para kay Mrs Baylon. Walang tatalo sa kwento ng bombilya—haired babaing ito at mga amigang biyuda niya. Aba, nabuntis, ‘coz they drank the essence of their dead husbands. How positively Freudian!

akibakada (a beerkada comic book) by lyndon gregorio

I enjoyed following Beerkada’s antics in their comic strip at the Philippine Star newspaper. Then I went on to greener pastures, moved to another office that didn’t subscribe to this daily.

I missed the gang’s company, though. I missed their wacky take on pop culture issues. I missed their way of transforming the solemn into the ridiculous, their social commentaries framed by lots of laughs, their growing up pangs mirroring our own, just more hilarious.

Everything that seemed to happen in and to affect our weird and wonderful Filipino culture sooner than later found its way into the Beerkada universe. It was somehow comforting to see that even as they encounter the big and small things that make the real world so burdensome the cast of wacky but distinct characters could always turn the situation into an inside joke.

Which they so did, again, in Akibakada, a play of words on Akihabara, Japan’s neon-light sensory-overload district. I don’t usually buy comics anymore, but, I figure, I deserve some laughs, after all the gory mysteries and dark fantasies I’ve been reading lately.

So, once more, I meet the Beerkada peeps, as they turn Japanese, embracing the quirky and the morbid (even Sadako!) in Japanese culture—and that means manga and anime, especially if they feature boy-on-boy romance, if you ask Boopey, who has a not-so secret thing for yaoi.

Glen, former torpe, used to be my favorite. I was surprised that I don’t find him as endearing anymore. I guess I changed, just as the gang grew up from college kids to young professionals. I like it that they don’t stay teenagers forever. Just like us, they evolve.

And I hope they evolve soon away from Glen’s current girlfriend, Chompy, for I simply can’t stand her!

Also in this volume are the old Beerkada members, Allan (career carouser), Jimmy and Fe (freaky couple), Harry (100% geek), Bryan (fat—the chicks dig it), and Psychocow (male cow with udders). Also making an appearance are Aling McBeal (fishball vendor with a vendetta), the Debtnote (if you write a person’s name on its pages, that person will pay you back every single centavo he owes you), Lady in the Toilet, and Demon Girl.

They’re funny; but they can’t compare with my now favorite Beerkada character—no other than Lyndon Gregorio himself, whose antics are so much funnier than any imaginary character could ever hope to possess.

code name high pockets by edna bautista binkowski

When I was a child, tatay, my grandfather, used to drop snippets of his time as a guerrilla soldier during World War II. I was too young, and uninterested to ever really hear.

He’s dead now, and though I still am largely uninterested in the details of war, I regret forgetting practically all his musings, for I am now largely interested in the history and culture of my country.

I’ve discovered a renewed passion, it seems, for home, thanks to my readings and travels.

If tatay were still alive, he will very likely wish to tell me about gun battles, ambushes, running for cover, comrades slain, and enemies killed. But I just read this book, Code Name High Pockets, which is about the true stories of ordinary and not-so-ordinary men and women involved in the resistance movement in the Philippines during WWII; under threat of torture, death, and worse from the Kempetai, interrogation officers of the Japanese army, they gave bread to starving prisoners of wars, delivered food, medicine, and messages to guerrillas hiding in the mountains, and helped friends and neighbors survive that hellish time.

Reading the book was also hellish for me; the author, Edna Bautista Binkowski, had this disconcerting ability to make those times real for this reader. She added names to dates, gave faces to participants, and made people out of historical figures. She told me their stories, pulled me into their lives, and kept me with them as they met horrific deaths, in the prison camps, during the Bataan Death March, or the foul dungeons of Fort Santiago.

One of those who played an important role in the war was Claire Phillips, an American who established an exclusive club in Manila for Japanese officers and affluent Japanese businessmen. She used her club to gather information and make money for the underground as well as guerrilla movement.

High Pockets is her story, but so is it also the stories of so many others: Filipinos, Americans, Spaniards, guerillas, nurses, businessmen, housewives, city folk, villagers… Most were leading quiet lives, until the war forced them to discover they were capable of great compassion, unimaginable hardships, and incredible heroism.

That there were so many of them was the highest and lowest point of the book, for I found it difficult to keep track of so many names across the pages. The pictures, black and white photographs that must have taken ages to find in the attics and trunks of these people’s sons and daughters, helped, but also gave me faces to dream about during the intense week reading from cover to cover.

Now, I’m thinking, if tatay were still alive, and if I were to listen, he would tell me about himself, his friends, his loved ones who lived and died, trying to make sense of the horror, or trying to do the best they could in the face of humanity’s worst.

Having read High Pockets, I am aware more than I care to of humanity’s best and worst, as it contains graphic accounts of the rape, mutilation, torture, and execution committed by the Japanese army on this land. It was war, for which demons and monsters had the right of might, and angels could only tread lightly.

On the title page, this is written: A legacy to the young ones, so that they may understand what the old ones had sacrificed.

I’m sorry I was too young, and tatay died before he found in his grandchildren the heart to know what he had sacrificed. But I’m glad that I have access to books such as High Pockets, and the willingness to read them, for though I know the value of forgiveness, I realize, upon reading this book, that it may not be such a good idea to forget—we may just repeat the unforgivable if we do.

——

I read High Pockets for my book club’s monthly reading challenge. The challenge in May was to read a book about Philippine history. I figure a book about an American Mata Hari in Manila would be an exciting read. I didn’t reckon that I would be stunned out of forgetfulness into awe, and sadness. ‘After the war, where did the heroes, who survived, go?’ we should ask ourselves, and try to find out. I bet stories of their struggles after the war are more tragic, and unrewarding, than their time fighting for freedom, in a time where everyone is busy forgetting.

Someday, not yet, I will read those stories. I am not as brave as Claire Phillips (alias High Pockets),  Naomi Flores (alias Looter), or Nurse Josefa Hilado. I can only take hellish a bit at a time.

For now, I would like to suggest to the book’s author and publisher to invest in additional editing for the book. Though well written, it had numerous grammatical errors, and could do with some ruthless cutting of details.