The Philippine Online Chronicles

The most basic element of Komix is Cartooning. Put simply, it is how a drawing ceases to be mere illustration and approaches narrative.

An example: it is what transforms a drawing of a frowning face dripping with sweat into a graphic representation of intensely frustrated anger. Another example: it is what transforms a drawing of a girl with one arm halfway up pointed towards a bouquet of balloons into a graphic representation of wide-eyed expectation thwarted by firm disapproval.

This subtle miracle of transubstantiation is the lifeblood of Komix at work on the page even before the dynamics of the juxtaposition of words and pictures kick in. It is what gives the drawings meaning, what gives it the ability to tell a story just by being itself.

Komix is a visual medium. The mastery and manipulation of the various idioms it has developed over the years – word balloons, sound effects, the various emanata like speedlines and teardrops, the various camera points of view (POVs) and transition effects – require the development of a keen visual eye aimed towards exploring and exploiting the medium’s capacity for narrative. Cartooning is nothing less than the actual act of applying these idioms to the page, of putting them to actual work, and a better understanding of its finer points will open up the medium as a whole – and the texts themselves – as more effective pieces of storytelling.

I have chosen two contemporary texts to help illustrate the dynamics of Cartooning and how it is actually employed on the page. These two texts are Manix Abrera’s 12 (VisPrint, 2009), and Macoy’s Ang Maskot (self-published, 2009). I chose these two texts as they both exhibit nothing short of an excellent understanding of Cartooning – how it works and how to make it work – and they both exhibit Cartooning’s wide if not widely-differing range as a narrative device, and they both exhibit Cartooning as primary priority over all the other narrative elements of the medium, ie, words, as in words in caption boxes, words in balloons. In fact, these two texts are effectively wordless, or at the very least have extended sequences that have no words at all. These are texts that tasked themselves to tell their stories without any words, instead relying purely on movement, gestures, poses: perfect situations for Cartooning to shine, the best conditions to study it.

Manix Abrera is best known for his daily strip Kiko Machine, being a running chronicle of the slacker half-lives of public school punks set to medium-shot three-panel gags, going on for nearly ten years this 2010. Abrera’s line is tentative and uneven, giving his characters a ratty doodley air, like the close-ups of marginal flipcartoons in your Math 1 textbook, which only adds to its young outsider appeal. His characters tend to have eyes as bulbous and white as ping pong balls, and grins that run ear to ear, exchanging pleasantries like “Rakenrol!” and “’Steeeg!” through their gritted teeth. His panels are usually half-filled with balloons fit to burst with words, the characters almost always remaining as talking heads talking at length in aid of the Setup-Elaboration-Punchline structure, which makes his latest book 12 all that more different if not more special and more important than all his previous work combined.

12 is a collection of twelve silent stories that hopscotch between whimsical fancies and moralistic vignettes – often a mixture of both – as far away thematically and formally from Kiko Machine as possible: in place of scatological punk musings are elaborations from Introduction to Philosophy; in place of incessant talking heads are endless panels of ponderous silence.

Abrera’s usual gang of idiots – thinly-veiled "iskos" and "iskas" of University of the Philippines, Diliman, i.e., your typical college kids – are replaced with bearded philosophers, cockroaches begging for their lives, girls with their eyes stuck on balloons, and scientists bathed by chemicals, thereby gaining superpowers filched from Marvel Comics.

12 is Abrera making an effort to stretch his drawing hand, and he succeeds up to a point, and it is by no means a small feat, but these things are not what makes 12 worthy of study.

What makes 12 worthy of study is its exploration of Cartooning that is founded on cause and effect, where movement happens because something made it happen, normally another movement preceding it, the narrative thoroughline worked out in the transition between before and after. The komiks panel in 12 is merely a single moment of time in a stream of other moments going on one after the other.

Often, if not in every single page, the book looks like a scrapbook of cutouts from animation cels laid out on the page in sequence: 12 is a very lucid extended exhibit of the capacity of Cartooning to tell stories in the mechanical way, “mechanical” as in deliberate physical movement, gestures that are literal and superficial, “superficial” as in everything is happening on the surface, as even when portraying fantastic images or events, they are very literally those things and those things alone. What you see is what you get.

In the first page of one story, a Little Girl is out in the Big City with her Mother standing in the middle of a crowded street. Amidst the throngs of people, the Little Girl sees a Man with Balloons. She turns to her Mother, presumably asking if she could get one for herself, but her Mother seemingly disapproves of the idea. The Little Girl disappointedly lowers her arm.

On page, the entire scene is portrayed in nine panels. If written in script form, it would read like this:

Page 1: Nine-panel grid

Panel 1: Shot of Big City. Skyscrapers bending in the wind. Below, a crowd of people going to the office.

Panel 2: Somewhere in the middle of the crowd is Mother with Little Girl, holding hands. Little Girl is turning her head.

Panel 3: Same shot. Little Girl is turning her head some more.

Panel 4: Same shot. Little Girl is excitedly pointing at Something, tells her Mother about it.

Panel 5: Same shot. Little Girl turned her head again, towards Something.

Panel 6: Close-up on Little Girl. A smile grows on her face.

Panel 7: Over the shoulder shot, over the shoulder of Little Girl, and we see the object of her interest: a Man with Balloons.

Panel 8: Same shot. Little Girl turns to Mother, pointing towards the balloon. “I want one!”

Panel 9: Same shot. Smile fades from Little Girl’s face, turns to disappointment as Mother sternly denies Little Girl’s wish.

Observe the repetition, the static camera placement, the minimal changes in perspective. Observe what is being shown us here: the transition between panels 1 and 2 not only sets up the location of the story but also sets up the situation – a Little Girl and her Mother are walking around in the Big City. The transition between panels 2 and 3 builds on the situation – Little Girl’s slow wary turning of her head suggests she is unfamiliar with the Big City, and this notion is reinforced by her unwavering fascination (panels 4 to 7) of balloons, a normal enough object in the Big City, but one whose presence Little Girl obviously enjoys (panel 8), the denial of which makes her undeniably sad (panel 9).

Now, imagine this scene with only panel 1, 2, 8, and 9:

the transition between panels 1 and 2 still retains its role as setup for both location and situation of the story, but the transition between panels 2 and 8 makes it look like the Little Girl, just like any other kid in the world, just really likes balloons. Sure, it’s more economical storytelling, only it skips over all the narrative detail elaborated on panels 3 to 7, detail that could quite possibly enrich the story with more drama if not subtle characterisation. It does not necessarily mean that more is better; it’s just that more is possible.

And this is ultimately 12’s strength: via its elaboration on the capability of strict Cartooning to carry a story by employing mechanical superficial movements alone, it shows that deliberate pacing can be employed to enrich a reading of a story, can be used as texture for the situation, as characterisation, as added dramatic complication. In this story alone, the narrative minutiae of panels 3 to 7 meant all the difference of adding the element of Alienation in the dramatic situation, which only made the ending all that more effective, maybe even over-effective.

It would have been something if it had captions along the tops of the panels providing a running monologue on the emotional status of the Little Girl (Panel 1: “The Big City! The stage upon which the orchestra of life plays it swinging big band tunes! The horn section busily rehearses in the back, bleating and blaring and bassily burping the Big City Beats!” Panel 2: “Caught in the cacophony is a little girl, holding on to her mother’s hand for dear sweet life. It’s her first time in the Big City, and her eardrums are already busted, her knees are already wobbly, and a strange man just offered her a lollipop from his pantaloons -” Panel 3: “- it’s a veritable nightmare!” and so on and so forth), but it’s something else to decide to show that instead through the pacing and framing of action alone.

12, of course, just like any other book, suffers from a few setbacks, 12's being of its own making, chief of which is the overall impression that the characters in the book are all merely puppets going through the motions of the narrative – action is portrayed because they have to be portrayed to make the characters and the stories move, or the even worse scenario of the characters being in the book because the actions needed doing, the stories needed telling, and these stories are often mere abstractions or clever profundities rendered in graphic form, philosophical musings that wrap up like Hallmark cards.

There is no risk, no blood spilled on the page, evoking no bigger reaction than “Aww.” This is the direct consequence of 12’s exhaustive exploration of the capability of strict Cartooning to carry a story via mechanical superficial movements alone, and it doesn’t help that the decision to make the characters look like filled-out stick figures – a decision made to make the characters theoretically more accessible, that if they’re not defined as anybody specific, they can be anybody – only makes them look that much more like ciphers, like puppets, faceless people who get cruel things happen to them.

And despite 12’s effort to distance itself from Kiko Machine formally and thematically, it still owes its basic narrative structure to its predecessor, namely the three-panel gag structure of Setup-Elaboration-Punchline only stretched to six- to twelve-page stories, giving the book not only an air of naive simplicity amidst all the cruelty and sadness – it’s only a joke? – but also strong degrees of predictability – all the stories are too similarly structured that by the time you’re reading the third story, you already know how it’ll end by its third page, the fourth story by its second page, et cetera et cetera.

All in all, 12 portrays a world defined by movement, by sheer literal action, where even the metaphors are portrayed literally – a philosopher searching for an answer to his constant question (a literal question mark floating over his head throughout the story) finds it in the night sky as he astrally projects himself into slipping into the question mark’s period where it turns into an exclamation point: there is no denying that this is a metaphor, but also that this just literally happened – approaching the level of ’pataphor. It is a world of restless quietude, eternally propelled by kinetic determinism, where things always need doing and there are people in it to do them, things always need to happen and there are people in it to happen to; a world whose borders, points of entry, and pace are defined by a sole architect, where life is naught but setup for a cosmic joke whose punchline is death, laughable only to beings who’d sooner put it back on the shelf after closing the book on it.

Next: Macoy's Ang Maskot!

All images capped from 12 © by Manix Abrera and VisPrint, used here for academic purposes. Point & Line banner illustration by Adam David.

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