The Philippine Online Chronicles

Some analyses on the mastery of form of Francisco V. Coching’s El Indio

When compared to contemporary komix’s present greats – Arnold Arre, Gerry Alanguilan, and Carlo Vergara – Francisco V. Coching still comes out on top as a true master of the form: Arre, while the better storyteller of the three, only really has one visual tone, ie, cute; Alanguilan, the closest aesthetic kin to Coching today and whose style is given to a wider range, still tends towards a more static (vs. Coching’s more dynamic) figure drawing, i.e., they look more like pictures caught in time than in sequence; and Vergara, the ideal compromise between Arre’s storytelling and Alanguilan’s range, is still too limited by the superhero idiom, i.e., his books still look like Western superhero comic books even when they’re not about superheroes.

Rarely do their art approach the level of the emo-physio narratology of El Indio’s page 28 panel 3 (the beginning of a bullfight, Fernando all dolled-up as a matador posing with a sword, his back to us, the large bull glowering in front of him, horns perked to strike, over them a gathering storm, clouds like billows of smoke on fire), or the chiaroscuric atmospheric drama of page 122 (a clandestine meeting in the woods as a bonfire flickers and fades, shifting shadows across leaves and bark and sombreros and folded fabric and smooth-skinned faces as the characters debate about love and the revolution), or the French-garden-stylings of each chapter’s splash page (by themselves ornate period illustrations, widescreen dioramic vignettes, the reader’s point of entry into the story, the characters caught in freeze frame from the previous chapter’s cliffhanger, the story now ready to continue).

The development of such a mature idiom at such an early stage in the art’s development is a curiosity: by 1952, we’d been doing komix for thirty years, interrupted for five by World War II, but by then it already had various visual shorthands for pictographic storytelling, shorthands that wouldn’t function in media other than komix. Among its more subtler elements, El Indio features a very mature understanding of typography, apparently courtesy of Luming Coching, Francisco Coching’s better half, the letterer of the book: aside from its title logo, the book employs nothing more than three variations of the same handwritten type, – Normal, Bold, and Hollow – all variously encased in emphatically hand drawn Caption Boxes and Word and Shout Balloons, and each is used deliberately and with conscious reason, dictated not only by sound volume, i.e., faintest to loudest, but also by emotional intensity and by the more spatial formalist concern of broadcasting ambient noise in a medium that is basically mute.

The three variations of type exhibit quite the range. In pages 14 and 15 alone, half a dozen panels illustrate this flexibility: page 14 panel 1 has a ranch hand’s emboldened exclamatory “FERNANDO!!,” a firm commanding shout tinged with some worry as Fernando, as a child, balances himself on a fence with a handstand; page 14 panel 2 has a hollowed disjointed exclamatory “YIYA!!,” a more carelessly playful shout than the previous panel’s, as Fernando rides yet another ranch hand as a mock horse; page 14 panel 3’s hollowed moderate “TSK .. TSK .. ARYAAA!!” is a rehearsed command evoked by Fernando the child pretending to be an adult, hoping to fool the (this time real and domesticated) horse he’s riding. The Hollow Type Variation proves to be the most flexible of the three, exhibiting much character and voice, as in page 15 it is used variably as a low ambient growl (an unballooned “GRRRRRRR!!” rolling around a character’s head) and as typical cinematic foley (a crisp “PAK!” as Fernando punches another boy on the side of the head), and both work effectively in their differing purposes, despite being virtually the same type.

(El Indio page 14, panels 1 & 2. Click to enlarge.)

This attention to the power of words and how they are rendered is seemingly a discipline that has lost its power at the advent of Adobe Illustrator and various other fontmaking programs, which is ultimately greatly ironic as these modern complex tools are all in aid of better and simpler manipulation of words as objects, and as it gives us a bountiful cornucopia of objectified type, it also increasingly separates us from type’s ability to communicate clarity of thought.

The story of the publication of this volume of El Indio is also of interest: painstakingly digitally-restored by Zara Macandili and Gerry Alanguilan for years, the two cleaning and restoring each and every page, down to Coching’s each and every line of ink, scanned off of pages on loan from the Coching Estate – and only copies of the pages, not even the originals themselves, at that – and all now collected and published for the first time ever as one glossy volume, the first time they’ve been printed since they first came out, pioneering in the Philippines the latest and maybe final stage of the paradox of komix as art and lit: after years of being a medium for the masses, it has turned into an elitist artifact with prices for individual pages selling for upwards of thousands of pesos. Now komix returns to the realm of modern mechanical production and to popular culture, now more academically-inclined, where it turns both into an elitist historical artifact and a populist commodity, or at least as populist as far as mass appeal and price admission will allow, which is not very far, which is still very elitist, as it ultimately betrays the text’s origins and intent – popular entertainment. Yet it is elevated by its current circumstance – glossy artifact selectively reclaimed from the various lacunae of art history – and by our own contemporary dilemmas – championing an underdog art beset with historical denial and amnesia – as ultimately, El Indio will be read in context to our current komix production, our contemporary situation and predicaments, and of course, comparisons will occur.

In its original incarnation, El Indio came out in five-page chunks every two weeks for a year and a half, written and drawn by one person, lettered by his wife, all in its dramatically elaborate baroque two-color glory, for a year and a half, with much grace and maturity and understanding of the form. The funny thing about this is, this circumstance is not solely El Indio’s – this book is only really the veritable tip of the iceberg, as Coching alone has a fifty-odd-strong bibliography. By 1952, the Philippines already had five major separate – and competing – komix publishers, all producing at least four komix every week, each title having four or five serialized stories. Granted, not everything would have reached El Indio’s formalist heights, but each of these things, if not a major chunk of them, will have made legit contributions to the form, each as valid as El Indio’s, and will have been of value for their comedic timing or aesthetic maturity or generic exploration. For the most part, these things are already lost to us, either by calamity or neglect or ignorance. Ultimately, thus is the value of Francisco V. Coching’s newly albumized El Indio: it is not sentimentality, or nostalgia, or the championing of one art style over the other; it is about reclamation, restoration, and evolution. Ultimately, it is about education.

Thanks to Mr Gerry Alanguilan for the additional information regarding actual production.

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