Fan Mode

I've been on fan mode lately, buying bargain comics at Comic Odyssey's 20 peso (Buy 5 Take 1) comics sale. It's not an event thing. It's an everyday thing at Comic Odyssey so you can walk in any branch of the store (as well as branches of Planet X) at any time and you will see this sale.

Much of the comics I've seen are 90s comics so they're not exactly classics, but it's a great opportunity to buy all those supposedly "hot" and "collectors item" issues back in the 90′s and check out what was the big deal in the first place. So yeah, I've been getting some Youngblood, Prophet, Brigade, Evil Ernie and other shit like that.

Surprising revelation #1: Prophet is actually a Christian comic book. Who knew? The title is supposed to be a clue, but you really can't tell with 90′s characters. Rob Liefeld created Chapel as well and he's got nothing to do with churches or religion at all. At least I think he doesn't.

There are some cool stuff in there, like say, Shaiana #1, published by Entity comics in 1995.

It's cool because it's drawn by none other than Beethoven Bunagan. Doesn't ring a bell? Well, maybe this will give you a clue:

For non-Filipinos, it's tantamount to someone like say, Jim Carrey deciding to draw a comic book and it looks pretty good. Click here for more info on Mr. Beethoven Bunagan.

FAT IS BEAUTIFUL

As a fan, I love looking at fat inking. And nobody really does it as well as Barry Windsor Smith. The trend in comics is go for thinner and thinner lines, and a lot of comic book readers seem to prefer it. Nobody does fat inking lines. I guess no penciller likes to draw them either. It's probably why there's has really been no comic book artist in recent memory who's work I'm a die hard hardcore fan of since Barry Windsor Smith.

The only other artist whose work comes close to this kind of inking is probably Nestor Redondo, as well as the many other great Filipino artists of long ago. Francisco V. Coching was awesome at this too.

Although I'm not as much of a hardcore fan of theirs, there are also a lot of other artists whose work I like. Like say this guy:

Without looking at the signature, can you guess who that is? I stumbled on to this and I immediately knew who it was. I'm so familiar with it since I've inked him for so many years. This is something he did long before he worked on X-Factor and X-Men.

I also picked up a copy of Predator Vs. Magnus Robot Fighter on the strength of the cover alone. Guess who drew the cover? Well, Barry Windsor Smith of course. Inside, I thought the art was pretty good. It looked like it was drawn by Lee Weeks, channeling Mike Mignola. Turns out, it WAS Lee Weeks. Where is this guy? He's one of the better artists to work in comics. His stuff is solid. If he's working in comics now, let me know and I'll check it out.

I mentioned Shaiana earlier, published by Entity. Also by Entity is ASTER. It's a comic book written and drawn by Filipinos, which started out as a local ashcan back in 1994. To you guys doing comics today, that means an indie. In the very early days of the independent comics industry in the Philippines, the Aster ashcan stood out as one of the most professional looking of the bunch. I remember a lot of us were very impressed by the few pages we saw in the ashcan.

It was quite a surprise when we found out later that they actually got a US publisher for it. It was awesome. We wanted to kill them, but it was quite an achievement. And when it got published, they even got people like Jae Lee, Joe Quesada, and even George Perez to create covers for it. It was INSANE.

My desire to kill them soon faded when I was actually hired by them to ink the second volume of Aster, and a few pages of Harriers, another one of their titles. It was a rather exciting time for me. It was my very first US based pro work.

It was actually quite a bittersweet experience. Wide eyed and naive, I was unaware of stuff like creator's rights, ownership of original artwork and stuff like that. The artwork was never returned to us and I only learned many many years later that the pages were recently sold on Ebay and the buyer contacted me, wanting to confirm if I really did ink those pages. I remember being really pissed when I learned about it. It's something I normally go apeshit over, specially today when I already know what is due me as a comic book creator.

Ok, this book wasn't included in the bargain sale. But I got it anyway. I can't help it. Even after all these years, after all my decades of comic book reading which includes amazing stuff by Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman, Jeff Smith, Posey Simmonds, Moebius, Ladronn, Herge, David Mazzucchelli, even Barry Windsor Smith, "X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga" still remains as my one greatest comic book. It's in a place in me that just can't be touched by anything, not even by Jean Grey's resurrection (sorry Kurt!) leading the creation of X-Factor, and all other subsequent appearances of Jean Grey.

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Terry Austin, Tom Orzechowski, Glynis Wein (and yeah, let's throw Jim Shooter in there too as he was the one who insisted on this book's tragic turn of events) did something uniquely special. They tapped into a unique part of creativity that hasn't really been repeated since. It's as if a great big hand threw open the doors to this insanely magical place and allowed us a peek for a brief moment, before closing it again.