Although there isn’t an equivalent for Marvel or DC in the Philippines, there is a local comics scene. It’s not quite an industry – you won’t find companies exclusively dedicated to the production of comics, and it’s not often you’ll find a comics maker who doesn’t have a day job. It’s also difficult to find serialized comics that come out on a regular basis the way the old newsprint komiks did in decades gone past.

But despite the largely "underground" and "independent" nature of Philippine comics, writers and artists are generally optimistic about the direction the scene is taking.

“Comics is still alive,” said komikero Gerry Alanguilan during the artistic gathering dubbed "the Renaissance." “Comics has evolved, the formats have changed, but it’s still alive.”

“Not only are we talented, but we do our best work by showcasing our own stories,” added Beerkada creator Lyndon Gregorio, about the crop of Filipino writers and artists getting involved in making comics.

And the number is growing. Comics conventions grow larger and more elaborate every year, to accommodate the lengthening list of writers and artists delving into sequential art. Most of them come out with zines or ash-cans – those cheap, photocopied pages of comics stapled together into a book and then sold at around P30 each during comics conventions.

Other comics makers, especially those who have been devoted to the craft over the last ten years, can get themselves published by companies which traditionally publish textbooks or magazines. Summit Media, for instance, recently came out with Underpass. Around the same time Vibal came out with El Indio, a re-printing of the old Francisco Coching comic. Anvil publishing also foraged into comics, producing the Renaissance book, which debuted during the event of the same name.

Despite the flourishing of comics in the Philippines, pundits invite both readers and makers to take a more critical standpoint. It’s true that more titles are coming out, and those who frequent comics conventions have more Pinoy superheroes, enkantos, slice of life and anime knock-offs to choose from. According to comics aficionados and critics Adam David and Carljoe Javier, it takes far more than a healthier show of comics produced to signal a true elevation of Philippine comics.

Different faces, same stories

The problem, says Javier, a voracious consumer of both local and international comics, is that many of the local comics books out there are still largely derivative of the foreign comics types that inspired them.

“We’re like James Cameron and Avatar—we’re just plugging in different settings using the same story all over and there’s no movement,” he said.

“Oftentimes, we just get a Western or Japanese concept and plunk it into a Filipino setting. That, or the problems in Filipino comic books aren’t rooted in Filipino concerns at all.”

A comic book about Filipino superheroes, for instance, transplants the tropes and storylines of American superheroes into the Philippine setting. Names and costumes are changed but the stories are largely the same.

“Our superhero comics don’t bother to imagine the socio-cultural or political impacts of the existence of superheroes in the Philippines. So even if you do have Pinoy superheroes, it’s like you didn’t think of how our history would be different if they had existed then, or what kind of impact that would have on society.”

And when it isn’t American comics the locally-made comics seem to be emulating, it’s Japanese manga.

“Ang younger creators, para kang nagbabasa ng Japanese manga sa problema ng mga character, sa mga nangyayari sa kanila. It seems very detached,” said Javier. (With our younger creators, it’s like you’re reading Japanese manga given the problems of their characters, or what happens to them. It seems very detached to the Philippine setting.)

“We’re not saying it has to be political,” he added. “But these comics should show a certain cultural consciousness which at present is absent from a lot of comics.”

The key to a successful comics story, said Javier, goes beyond simply “plunking in” Filipino characters or cultural icons into archetypes grown from foreign traditions.

“It’s misappropriations of certain cultural conventions,” he said.

Instead, what comics creators should strive for is “to re-contextualize and to re-imagine” their stories.

Practice, practice, practice

The other problem, according to David—who is a writer and comics maker in his own right, has more to do with how the works themselves are executed.

Good concepts alone don’t make a good comic, and David emphasized that the only way for an aspiring comics maker to get over delivering derivative works or average comics is to continually strive to be better.

“There’s a tendency for a lot of the people who delve in the arts to not be critical of their own works,” he said.

The comics makers who produce the best works, he says, are the ones who not only repeatedly produce new works, but the ones who listen to criticism and inculcate them into their newer works. He added that it helps to educate oneself in the art of making comics, for instance by reading up on what has been written in the subject, such as "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud, whose works are easily available online.

Having a good idea, he stated, will only work if one has the artistic or writing skills to match it. Such skills however, are developed over a long span of time and often, over many failed works.

“The sickness of most people is that they get an idea and just go with it even if they haven’t thought it over very well,” said David. “Otherwise, they come up with works where the idea was much better than the way it was executed because maybe the way they write isn’t up to par with the concept, or maybe they haven’t matured in the use of their medium to encapsulate their vision.”

“We’ve been talking about craft,” added Javier. “It’s a matter of people studying their craft and really working on it and realizing, before you can make something good, you’ll be making a lot of lousy things first. Other people will definitely criticize you at first, and you have to be ready to take it.”

Javier warned that simply producing as many works as one can will not necessarily make one a better comics creator.

“You should read up on it first, or think of comic books and story-telling on a more theoretical level. You have to understand comics as its own specific art form, with its own conventions and its own rules,” he said.

Javier referred to Sturgeon’s Law, pointing out that “90% of what you produce will be crap.”

“So produce 100%,” he said. “And then take the 10% which is good. That’s what you bring out.”

Commitment issues

David added that it usually takes a long time before a comics maker is able to reap the fruit of their efforts. For instance, he said, comics makers Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo worked for many years before they were able to come out with Trese.

Trese, which was originally conceptualized almost a decade ago, grew into a project between Tan and Baldisimo, who created the script and pages for the comics over their lunch hours during work. Today, Trese is one of the most popular locally-produced comics books, with three compiled volumes being sold in bookstores alongside graphic novels from the likes of DC or Marvel.

According to David however, the long and oftentimes circuitous route to producing quality comics is marked by compromises with the real world – that is, the writer or artist’s need to produce a stable income.

Making and selling comics is rarely lucrative. As mentioned by David, the entirety of comics being produced nowadays, from the P30 ash-cans which can only be sold during comics conventions, to the textbook-quality comic books produced by mainstream publishers, can all be considered "independent." This is because it is usually the makers themselves who have to put money forward to put their works into print, whether or not they are able to make up for the losses.

“It’s something to think of, for those who want to make comics—there’s no money, no market for our dreams to come true at the level we want them to, so we have to compromise,” said David.

Producing cheap zines for comics conventions is a compromise, he said. So is finding time in between one’s other priorities to continue working on one’s stories, as was the case with Tan and Baldisimo.

“You can find a way to do it even with work,” he said. “The plans you have in mind, that epic you’ve been thinking of since you were 16 years old, you don’t have to finish all that in a month. You just have to work on it, work on your comics, even while being realistic about your situation.”

“You might have to find a job, or do something else in between that thing you really want to do. For everyone with that kind of experience—hang in there.”