Writing into the future, part 2

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Last Sunday’s featured works — the excerpts from Attriu Marcus Cabusao’s fiction and Kid Millado’s bricolage of Sandman and Batman — are just some of what readers of high art or popular literature are inspired to create.

And the inspiration does not always come from cultural artifacts from America or other foreign shores. Vanessa Almeria, a Creative Writing student of UP Mindanao, teamed up with Glen Obenza, a BA English student from MSU General Santos, to produce their comic book, GiMix UP.

Drawing from the popular Kiko Machine Komix, a compilation of comic strips originally published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and created by one-time Philippine Collegian Graphics Editor and Fine Arts graduate Manuel “Manix” Abrera, Van and Glen came up with their own cast of major and minor characters. One such character is the bully Rambo, seen here playing a prank on an unsuspecting professor. The joke might be a bit stale, but is given a fresh treatment with how it is told panel by cartoon panel.

“GiMix UP is a collection of cartoon panels that tell a joke or a story,” Van explained during her presentation. “Unlike Abrera’s Kiko Machine, it has three major student characters namely, Menggay, Rambo, and Abby. Menggay is an emo chick, Rambo is a bully, and Abby is a strong-spirited gay male. One of the major characters in Kiko Machine is used as a minor character in GiMix UP, but appears only once (Menggay and her admirer’s scene). The structure is also patterned after Abrera’s Kiko Machine. The jokes and stories are mainly about the tough and challenging life in UP Mindanao. Given that the issues are about the students’ experiences in the university, the scenes are all set in familiar UP Mindanao hangouts, say for example, Ate Ling’s, Kiosk, Canteen, CHSS-AVR, etc. We used Bisaya given that our target audience comes mainly from Mindanao. But we also used some Tagalog, Ilonggo, and English words and phrases, not to mention gay lingo, to show the diversity of the students’ lifestyles and attitudes.”

More original in conception, though still drawing from the popular manga, is Jasper Nikki de la Cruz’s Siatong: Gisaksak sa Puso, Mitulo ang Dugo. Adapting the popular manga format using ordinary games or toys to power a dueling narrative – Beyblade, Super Yoyo, Yugi-Oh, to name just a few – Jasper crafts a story about a group of friends who sets out to win the Tagum Siatong Championships.

Jasper provided this gist for his graphic story: “My story is set in Tagum ten years from now. Emos have been banned from existence. Siatong has also been recognized as the Pambansang Laro ng Lungsod ng Tagum. Four friends – Kate B. Kinse (a very kind-hearted kid), Drake You (the alpha-male bestfriend), MC Concepcion (the most skillful and underrated player), and Tangz (the strategist) – sign up for the annual Tagum Siatong Championships. But they have to win the Poblacion Qualifiers first. They meet up against Finding Emo, the Emo Revival Activists group lead by Ultiemoticon. What follows is a brutal combat of siatong as the Emo group cheats their way into the game by using loopholes in the rules.”

With his friends, Ivo Angelico Auxilio doing the art and Simon Ed Lusan providing the color, Jasper (in his own words) “attempts to abuse the archetypes and clichés of the genre,” but in the process also presents a riotous and sidesplitting adventure.

(Next week: Romancing the romance, Mindanao style)