This story was partly inspired by Typhoon Milenyo and one of the anecdotes I heard after that storm. One of my officemates emailed that he overheard the conversation of a family who were in the mall because they didn't have any electricity at home. The father turned to his son and said, "Okay, we still don't have electricity, so we're going to check in a hotel. They don't have Disney Channel over there, so you'll have to bare with that for awhile." So, while there were other families out there who had to deal with not having no roof above their heads, some families had to deal with not being able to watch their favorite cable channel. It made me wonder what were people willing to do to keep the lifestyle they currently have.
The idea to have Bagyon Lektro, a lightning elemental, be in charge of the electric company was inspired by The Shinra Electric Power Company from the game Final Fantasy. Actually, I've never played the game, but Marco Dimaano played it a lot and raved it about whenever we got together back then. I thought it was a very interesting idea: to have a corporation, men in business suits, invade and take-over this land that has fantasy elements in it. The collision of of those two concepts was something I always wanted to use in a story.
Lastly, the story was inspired by another real-life event: the explosion of the Rockwell Coal Plant in the 1960s. The coal plant was destroyed and area where it used to stand is now called Rockwell, where you will find the Powerplant Mall.
Kurt Busiek recently uploaded the cover and some preview pages of his new series THE WITCHLANDS. He talked about this at the San Diego Comic Con in 2009. The premise was exciting and intriguing. When I read about Wildstorm being shut down, I got worried that we wouldn't get to see this series anymore. So, I was happy to read that it's finally pushing through.
KURT BUSIEK: It’s called Kurt Busiek’s American Gothic. We were going to call it Bill Willingham’s American Gothic, but there were trademark problems with the title.
It’s a hard series for me to describe, but I’m encouraged by that because the other series that I’ve done that was difficult to describe were Marvels and Astro City. So, I think we’re in good company.
It’s a fantasy series set in the United States --it’s contemporary fantasy, urban fantasy, historical fantasy.
You might see stories in it ranging from the story of a long haul trucker whose wife died when he was on the road so he never had the chance to say goodbye, who finds himself driving her ghost on to her final reward.
The story of girl in an economically depressed fishing town in Rhode Island who discovers that the Norse God Thor is living in exile in coastal island nearby
The story of some college students who accidentally resurrect the Ninkasi, Sumerian goddess of beer
The tale of a voodoo priest called in to deal with the unquiet ghost of a murdered business.
The story of a washed-up cooking show host whose quest for the perfect burger leads him out of the real world and into the borderlands of hell
You understand why, I think, it’s a little difficult to describe.
There will be some recurring characters but like Astro City, they’re not the lead characters. They’re a recurring cast that will appear when we need them and fade away when we don’t
What happened with American Gothic was the whole time I was writing Trinity, I had this year long story all outlined, so the part of my brain that thinks up new stuff kept coming up with new stuff and I kept writing them down.
…when I was done I realized I had a whole bunch of fantasy stories set in the U.S. and I said, well I could try sell all of these as mini series and I’d have to sell each one independently or I could come up with a title, jam them all together, and have to get people to yes only once.
Once I did that, the title American Gothic kind of swam into place, and I started to thinking of the interconnections and think of what else could be done and the series became a lot more about American mythology.
Most fantasy is rooted in European mythology and European mythology is… it’s old. It’s been around for a long time. We don’t know the roots of a lot of it, but America has only been around for a few centuries and we can see the pulling mythology there, stuff that we borrowed from other cultures, or in some cases, enslaved and dragged over with other cultures. Stuff that was here when we got here, stuff that has happened along the way, like, to somebody like me, the idea that, when the silver spike was hammered in and when the transcontinental railway was built, we had built a line of steel all along across the entire country. There’s got to be great mystic symbolic power in that. We’re exploring a vast and mysterious world.
It’s not quite accurate to say that this does for fantasy what Astro City does for superheroes, but they would very much like me to say that. So, I’m saying it.
It’ll be good. The first arc will be drawn by Connor Willumsen, who was in the anthology series Pop Gun and other places. His work is stunning.
Wherein Dr. Raymond Langston (Laurence Fishburne) defines as "aswang" as "a half-breed, half-vampire, half-werewolf".
Which is how a foreigner would probably describe an aswang based on how it's been depicted in our movies, TV shows, and comics.
From the little that I've read, the creatures with the most defined and consistent descriptions have been the manananggal, the tikbalang, the kapre, the duwende, and the nuno. When it comes to describing what an aswang looks like, that's when it starts to vary. As mentioned in Wikipedia: "Aswang stories and definitions vary greatly from region to region and person to person, so no one particular set of characteristics can be ascribed to the term."
Which is probably why, whenever aswang are shown, they range from vampiric looking creatures to demonic looking ones. Interesting how there is no one single, consistent description of what an aswang looks like.
Last Saturday, I attended the Birmingham International Comics Shows aka BICS. I expected to be as big as the San Diego Comic Con, but it turned out to be smaller, even smaller than the annual Komikon that we have back in Manila.
The hall probably had 30 or so tables, with the usual mix of creators with photocopies comic books and offset printed books. (UPDATE: Based on this report by Richard Bruton in the Forbidden Planet blog, it seems like I missed an entire hall of other exhibitors. I wonder where that was located. I didn't see any signs.)
I was hoping there would be a comic book store like Forbidden Planet would have a table there, but there was none. So, I even though I got to see Bryan Hitch, Charles Adlard, Duncan Fegredo, and Charles Vess, I wasn’t able to get anything signed since I didn’t have any of their comic books with me at the time.
There were several talks happening that day and I stumbled into the “BRIT PACK”. I looked at the program guide and it read: “Tim Pilcher gives us the low-down on the state of the comics nation, as he explores the current UK comics scene, plus special guests.”
It was the tail end of the talk when I entered the hall, but what they were talking about was no different from things that have been discussed at komikons, at message boards, and on blogs over here.
How do we get more kids to read comics?
Is the printed comic book on its way to extinction?
Will all comics be digitally distributed?
One of the speakers made the fearless forecast that the monthly comic book will disappear in the next 5 to 10 years, to be replaced by the digital comic book, and the printed comic book will be a compilation of the digital monthlies.
They also talked about how whenever great new talent appears in British comics, they end up working with Marvel and DC and get locked into exclusive contracts with the American comic book companies.
It was also mentioned that aside from the small press / indie press / creator-owned books, there were not a lot of venues for new comic book creators. Looking at the comic book shops there, the longest running comic book titles are probably 2000 A.D. and JUDGE DREDD. Mark Millar’s CLiNT is just on its second issue and he’s devoting 3-4pages for new talent, but obviously, that’s not enough.
Makes me wonder what were the conditions that brought about this kind of comic book scene in Britain.
I looked around that hall and noticed that most of attendees were men in their 30s. Where were the teen-agers? Where were 20-year old guys-- and girls? Considering that the venue of BICS was near a university, I was wondering, where were all the college kids? If they were there, there were not a lot of them.
So, it’s a bit encouraging to know that whenever we have comic book events in the Philippines that we get a good mix, a good age range of readers and creators.
And yet, our little local comic book scene still needs to gain the strength and momentum to become a thriving industry once more.
Come knocking at the door of The Diabolical and get the chance to win a treat from Trese.
What’s the treat? This limited-edition Trese poster by Kajo Baldisimo.
To win, draw any character from the Trese graphic novels and show them trick-or-treating. Drawings can be in black-and-white or full-color. 13 winners will be chosen by me and Kajo.
To submit: 1. post your drawing in your blog, DeviantArt, Twitpic, Flickr, Tumblr, or wherever it is you post your artwork. 2. Label it as TRESE: TRICK OR TREAT 3. Post a link of your artwork in the comments page and include the following: YOUR FULL NAME YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS LINK TO YOUR ARTWORK
Ready! Get set! Scare us! BOOO!
Deadline is on October 31, 2010
UPDATE: Here are the recent entries to the contest!
Couple of weeks ago, I read this announcement in Bleeding Cool that Alan Moore was giving a talk in Northampton for the benefit of the Fight for Sight Eye Research.
I quickly checked Google Maps and saw that Northampton was two hours away by train from Manchester. I didn’t care if it was four hours away by camel. It felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet one of my comic book idols.
The event was held in the Great Hall of the Guildhall. The hall could’ve comfortably fit a hundred people, but there were only 50 of us, maybe even less. While waiting outside, I saw people walk up to the poster, read it, and then try to explain to their companion who Alan Moore was. “He wrote Watchmen and V for Vendetta!” One lady just said, “Well, he looks scary,” and continued to walk down the street. I just couldn’t believe that people from Northampton weren’t excited to meet Alan Moore.
His heavy footsteps echoed as he strode down the hall clad in a beige paisley blazer that seemed golden under the light and at certain angles revealed the patterns on the cloth. His electric blue necktie seemed to crackle above his black shirt, matching his black jeans and his black leather shoes, which seemed to reflect a purplish hue, reminding me of The Joker.
He stood at the foot of the stage and didn’t use the mic. “You can all hear me okay, right?” His voice boomed and reverberated in the hall. “I’ve been here before for other performances and I know this hall has really great acoustics.” None of us disagreed with him.
It felt like I was in front of Ozymandias, listening to his master plan on how to take over the world. If he floated off the ground, it would’ve felt like being in the presence of Dr. Manhattan.
“I assume you all know who I am and that’s why you’re here,” Alan Moore said. “Unless there’s someone in the back who came in here thinking, `I thought we were going to see that guy from Die Hard! No? He’s not Alan Rickman?`”
Alan Moore paced as he continued to talk, “Since most of you are probably not from here, let me tell you a little about Northampton.” And for the next hour, he told us the history of Northampton, starting from the dawn of time. As it turned out, he was going to use all that knowledge for his second novel Jerusalem, which would detail his home town’s history, specifically, an area called The Boroughs, as well as his family’s history.
He said, when he’s finished with the book, it’ll be 2,000-pages thick and while most books will have a blurb in the back that says, “I just couldn’t put it down”, the blurb of this book will probably be the exact opposite.
He talked about how one of the knights who went on the crusades, ended up in Jerusalem and walked up to Golgotha. An angel appeared before him and told him to pick up this stone (or was it a cross?) and to bring it back to England. The knight walked all the way back and was guided by the angel set it down at the center of all England. That place was Northampton. Alan Moore also mentioned that Hitler stopped invading England when he reached Northampton because Hitler considered it the center of the country and if he already had that, then he generally had control over everything. So, Alan Moore pointed out, if angels and Hitler considered Northampton as the center of it all, then that was good it enough for him, because as he earlier mentioned, for some strange reason, Northampton is ignore by most of the country. He said, it isn’t even mentioned in the weather reports.
When he reached that point of Northampton’s history when they supposedly didn’t burn two witches, he read a chapter from his first novel Voice of the Fire, that focused on two women who were burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft and for being knitting partners.
He took a sip of water, sat down, and read from the book. He first apologized if what he was about to read would offend anyone, because most certainly, everything he has ever written has offended someone for some reason or another.
Alan Moore is as great a storyteller as he is a writer. His deep voice droned as he begun his tale, but he’d shift his tone as he read the dialogue of the different characters, whisper when need be, and pause at the right moments, looking up from the book, staring at you, as if to check if you haven’t freaked out yet.
He continued to talk about the history of The Burroughs and then read from an issue of Dodgem Logic, his underground magazine about Northampton. He took a walk around The Burroughs with a friend and jotted down notes, which he turned into heroic couplets. He said, “We are all heroes. That’s how we see ourselves – heroes in our own stories.” His poem begins and ends with the line, “Heroic couplets. That’s what this place needs.” Over two pages long, he described the different people he saw on the streets of Northampton and talked about their lives and their struggle.
He then entertained questions from the audience.
Someone pointed out that his most recently works shows how much he loves Northampton and asked would he ever considered doing something like what Harvey Pekar did and how he wrote about life in Cleveland.
Alan Moore mentioned that Pekar was a good friend, felt sad for his death, and proceeded to describe one of Pekar’s comic strip, where Harvey just goes to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, gets some lemonade, and drinks it. The strip didn’t use any words, but the visuals were like poetry, said Moore. It showed how wonderful life was and how we can enjoy drinking lemonade. He admires Pekar’s work but doesn’t think he can do the same thing.
But he really loves his hometown. When he heard some high school students were doing a film about the Boroughs, he decided to help them out and wrote some parts of their project. (Now, how many kids out there can say their film was written by Alan Moore?)
He talked about why he has not watched any of the films that have been based on his work and he said he wrote those stories for comic books. They weren’t designed to be made into movies. He said, he was showing off what comic books could do and that he was doing things that can only be done in comics, just like the Black Freighter comic-book-within-a-comic-book-story that he did in Watchmen.
He did mention that he’s written a script for a 10-minute short film. It’s called (not sure if I heard this right) Jimmy’s End and it’s about a writer, novelist, occultist living in Northampton, trying to take over the dreamtime of the Borough, the whole of England, and maybe even the world. As expected, the moment the universe hears, “Alan Moore has written a film script!” he suddenly got calls from producers and studios wanting to be a part of it.
In the film, the characters play a video game, so a video game company has called him up and said they’d want to produce the actual game. The characters in the film also watch a soap opera, so another studio called up and said they want to produce the episodes of the soap that will appear in the film. A music company that manages some well-known bands has offered to do the soundtrack for the film.
Goes to show Alan Moore’s powers at work. He conjures a story and the universe unfolds for him.
Given the chance, would he ever go back and write another superhero comic? He said, no. What attracted him to super hero comics was not the super heroics, it was the world of wonder that they presented. It was world that fascinated his imagination, a world where cities could be placed in bottles and dogs with capes could fly. And as much as Superman’s dog was fantastic, Batman’s dog was even better because he wore a cape and—a mask! (Just in case the other dogs might recognize him.) Moore continued to say that, back then, the writers were actually telling science fiction stories in the guise of comic book. Later on, this generation of writers came in and just wanted to do fan-service to the medium and just started to tell more of the same stories.
When he wrote Watchmen, he was trying to bring in things that he learned from novels and science fiction stories and tell it as a comic book. In writing Jerusalem, he’s now trying to bring in all that he learned from writing comic books, being descriptive and wanting the reader to visualize this world, and tell it in novel form and that’s why it going to be over 2,000-page thick.
He gave examples of why he didn’t like the American comic book industry anymore and talked about the time Marvel was about to give back Jack Kirby some of his original art. Marvel, being gracious, Kirby they were ready to turn over 900 pages of his artwork (even though they still held on to over 9,000 pages).
Later on, boxes filled with Jack Kirby pages mysterious disappeared from the Marvel offices and mysterious appeared at an art dealer’s office somewhere in New York. This was all supposedly masterminded by an editor from Marvel.
Years ago, at a comic book convention, Moore told the same story but pretended it happened to a British artist. As he told the details of the crime, he stared at the Marvel editor who was in the audience. When he finished talking, the editor supposedly stood up and yelled, “This is a kangaroo court!” Makes me wonder on the identity of that editor.
Moore was asked about the progress of the next issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. His eyes widen, got all excited, and said that Kevin O’Neill is almost done with the first part of the 1960s story arc, that it might take them a couple of years to finish everything but we’ll get to see the first issue soon. He said, it’s the best one yet! And because all the characters they’re depicting as still owned and copyrighted under their respective companies, they’ve had to tap dance around how those characters are named and drawn.
Someone asked him, would he be interested in setting up an academy for writers in Northampton. He said, he’d be willing to help it out, but he doesn’t think he can run it or teach fulltime. He said, he didn’t imagine how much time it takes to run an underground magazine like Dodgem Logic and that it has affected his schedule for writing other things.
“But shouldn’t you set one up? What happens when you’re gone?” the man persisted.
Moore said, he thinks what he’s doing now is already something for the future, that his stories will outlast him. He asked, what do you know about the Victorian era -- is mostly about what we read from Charles Dickens. What do you know about England in the 1600s -- is mostly about what we read from Shakespeare. They shaped and created those realities for us and we can do the same today.
After the Q&A, we all lined up to get our stuff signed and he signed everything that was placed before him. It didn’t matter if people brought their old copies of Watchmen or the latest Absolute Edition of Promethea, he signed them all. One collector brought an original page from one of Moore’s comic books (I couldn’t see what it was) which was already signed by the artist. Another guy painted portraits of Moore and asked him to autograph the canvass.
I brought along a copy The Killing Joke. When I read it back in 1988, it contributed to my mind getting warped and brainwashed me into loving the comic book medium even more.
As Moore signed the book, I asked him if he’s ever seen or heard Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis do their imitation of him. He said, he’s heard about it, but they’ve never done it in front of him. He has asked Gaiman to perform it. “C’mon Neil! Show me your Alan Moore,” he’d tell Gaiman. “But he’d always dry up,” said Moore.
I mentioned that when they imitate him, they make their voice very deep and exaggerate a bit. “I’m sure it’s all very satirical,” he said. “Eddie Campbell does a good me. He’d pretend to have my long hair and try to swipe it away from his face.”
I then gave Alan Moore a copy of Trese and told him its secret origin. “I originally pitched this story to Marvel with Marvel characters, but it got rejected. So, I changed the story, changed the setting from New York to Manila and I was able to find a publisher who liked it.”
“And why not!” Moore said as he flipped through the book. “Why does everything need to be set in New York? Why not set in Wolverton or Northampton. Keep it close to home.”
I had my picture taken with him, shook his hand, said thank you, and then shook his hand again.
Felt so excited and energized. I think I was running like a mad man all the way back to the train station. I think I could’ve run all the way back to Manchester.
Thinking about everything that Alan Moore said, I think the Philippine comic book scene is on the right track. It’s great that we’re telling stories about home, about our heritage, about ourselves. Our stories celebrate our being Pinoy, whether we are telling our own versions of spandex-clad heroes or using silent panels to depict our so-called mundane life, which will look like poetry in the eyes of the reader, which will shape the reality of future generations.
“Heroic couplets. That’s what this place needs.”
More reports / blog posts about the Alan Moore Northampton event:
Thanks to ROCKETKAPRE for recording and uploading the Horror Panel from “Literature From Shakespeare to Bob Ong: Bridging the Divide Between the Popular And the Canonical” conference, held at the UST on August 18, 2010.
In the panel are authors Bart (G. M.) Coronel (Tragic Theater), David Hontiveros (Penumbra novellas, Pelicula, Bathala Apokalypsis) and me.
When I was still a little boy (okay, so I was always overweight and not that little) I didn’t like going to sleep early (and not much as changed). When it was already bedtime, I’d always find a reason to get out of bed. My dad would then tell me that there was an aswang outside the window and he’d tell me that I should stay in bed and protect him. This, of course, would freaked me out and made me reconsider my wanting to watch TV.
It was stories like those that somehow comes into play whenever I write my stories. I grew up in a household where stories about aswang and ghosts and duwende were part of every day conservation.
As it turns out, my dad’s family already had their fair share of paranormal encounters even before I was born. Last August, me and Wella went to Bacolod, my dad’s home town. We went to the house where my dad grew up and had dinner with my cousins and my uncle.
That's my dad sitting on grandfather's knee.
My uncle told us the story of how my grandfather went missing during the Second World War. So, my Tito Jo used the Spirit of the Glass to track down the location of my grandfather. The glass slid across the wooden board and spelled out T-A-L-I-S-A-Y.
Turned out my grandfather was captured by Japanese soldiers and was placed in a POW camp in Talisay. On the day of his execution, a new commander arrived at the camp. The officer turned out to be my grandfather’s classmate and he spared my grandfather’s life.
It was just interesting to find out that how my family has always had some encounter with the supernatural even as far back as the 1940s.
