The Philippine Online Chronicles

This is the second part of a two-part essay on Cartooning. The first part of the essay is focused on Manix Abrera's 12. This part is about Macoy's Ang Maskot. For more discussion on the finer points of komix-reading and making that are sadly absent from these essays, I recommend you go to Indie Komplex, a local online forum for fostering basically that sort of thing.

Macoy’s worldview, on the other hand, is one full of symbolic resonance, where an image of a bird hopping by one’s feet can lead to sublime life-changing epiphany, or at least, only if the character decides to see it that way. This seemed trite the first time I read Macoy’s Ang Maskot, but it was a proposal I eventually came to accept and revere when his short crime drama Operasyon (self-published, 2009) came out that same year, and with it yet another elaboration of the author’s worldview, only with more poignancy, with more maturity, the message coming across sharper, clearer. It made me reconsider my thoughts about Ang Maskot, made me read it again, only now with more attention to what made it work – or not work – for me.

Ang Maskot chronicles a day in the life of an irate mascot for a local fast food place called McBird, thus his mascot costume is that of a big bird – technically looking like a fowl, specifically a duckling, but basically looking like any generic cartoon bird – a costume that, after grudgingly performing for a nightmarish children’s birthday party – a wonderfully-rendered three-page sequence that ends with a gleefully malicious splash page of the protagonist’s sheer utter contempt for the kids – he finds he can’t take off and will need to wear up until the next day, all the while taking care not to rip or tear it by accident or from his temper, lest he pays for it, all P300,00 deducted from his paycheck. And of course, as expected, complications arise.

And yet even when the complications arise as expected – they’re basically requirements for any stories, but most especially for stories like this – they don’t come off as predictable, which I figured was the root of my misunderstanding of the book that gave way to my initial issues with it: I misread the dramaturgy meeting expectations as “predictability,” its journey to epiphany as “trite,” not seeing the long view implications of these narrative markers, not seeing their greater purpose, which is, put simply, elaborations of the author’s world view, which is, put simply, a foil if not direct antithesis of Abrera’s 12.

Macoy’s is a world populated by people stuck in ruts of their own making, living less than exciting lives, either deeply unhappy or regretlessly resigned to their stations in life. The keys to their salvation are mundanely everywhere – birds, soiled clothing, a driverless bus – if only they’d pick up on it, if only they have the desire – the will, the ability – to change both themselves and their lives. And that is what’s important in Macoy’s stories, especially in Ang Maskot: the story stems from decisions the characters actively make, whether for good or for bad; it influences everything, makes the story flow; there may be an apparent author in the proceedings, but one that does not influence the narrative, one that does not impose on the characters – they make their own decisions, they glean their own meanings. It is a thoroughly humanist agnostic worldview rendered as shapes on paper.

And as accompaniment to this fully-formed worldview is an aesthetic approach to Cartooning that is just as fully-formed, as if rehearsed and rerehearsed over and over again in the basement, developed in tandem with the philosophy, the two combined as a production of singular authorial vision, now finally deployed in komix form, where now we get to see the full performance: Cartooning’s priority in these pages is not only to recreate the passage of time, but to also be an indelible part of the ongoing drama, where the actions are not merely perfunctory but deliberately chosen for their dramatic weight.

In a sequence early in the book, when the protagonist discovers that his costume’s zipper is stuck, he proceeds to vent his increasing frustration of this fact to the fast food place’s branch manager. It’s a simple scene that takes about ten panels to tell, spread over two and a half pages, the overall vibe traditionally slapstick: the humour is achieved via the juxtaposition of the protagonist’s escalating anger and the branch manager’s maintaining his managerial nonchalance to the protagonist’s fury and subsequent desire to tear the costume apart, the joke’s – and the protagonist’s fury’s – breaking point being the reveal of how expensive the costume is, a revelation that turns the protagonist into a borderless squiggly sketch of himself, his confidence, fury, his urgency deflated in two panels. It’s an excellent scene, a wonderful and precise example of designing and pacing action and dialogue on the page, the camera view flipping left to right to left to right as each speaker speaks, then switching to a widescreen panel for bigger emotional impact as the protagonist delivers his killing stroke, then deflected by the branch manager in two panels, the second a classic look-into-the-eyes-of-the-reader type of close-up, and it’s like a one-two punch combo, a jab and an uppercut, as in the last panel, the protagonist is left shaken and unsure, as if he himself was indeed literally hit by a punch and an uppercut.

The last three panels are especially beautifully thick as in one fell stroke, they provide a punchline for the scene (short-term funny-haha), motivation for the character (long-term drama), and also acts as initial (and constant) complication for the narrative (long-term funny-haha), ultimately all paying off nicely by the end of the book. All this narrative gravitas is in those ten panels – central of which are five – all this achieved because in every basic individual element of the page, ie, in every panel, there is an effort for narrative – he is tired and angry and frustrated – because there is an effort for emotional individual recognition – he has reached the limits of his patience – because there is an effort for pathos – I can relate to the guy because I know how it’s like to be condescendingly ignored by the boss – all this while also exhibiting an advanced understanding of pacing, characterization, and page design.

Ang Maskot is Cartooning at its most basic, aimed to its most advanced usage, in no small part because of its exploration of Cartooning’s main raison d’etre: characterisation. It’s no big leap to say that Macoy’s stories – so far there are four of them – are always focused on Character, the portrayal of which is so clear and so concise it gets done in two or three panels, tops, regardless if it were a human, an animal, or a human in an animal suit, all thanks to a keen understanding of the komix idiom itself, of the visual shorthand to get points across – it is basically Caricature: the protagonist is a nervous smoking wreck of a man who’d had enough of his tenure as a mascot, so give him oily slept-in unkempt unwashed hair and slender eyes under furrowed brows; the fast food branch manager is a bit of an obnoxious ass hat, so give him a big Neeson nose and gently-sculptured coiffure to give him a vaguely superior Caucasian air; the potential love interest is meek and mousy, so dress her in homely lived-in shirt and jeans and give her bangs that she herself cuts in front of the mirror every Sunday; the twins are sugar-rushed hyper little kids, so make them scrawny and give them wide eyes with small pupils, and to tell them apart, give them hairdos with opposing brushstrokes and opposing growths of teeth. It’s all deceptively simple and simplistic, and it’s very very effective.

Much like 12, Ang Maskot can be read as an exercise in the capacity of art to tell a story all by itself, kept to its own innate narrative devices independent of words, referring only to what came before and what’s coming next, only Ang Maskot also chose to explore the narrative capacity of the lone image itself, independent of anything and everything else. You do not need to know what came before and what will come next; these things are already inferred in the image. It is true pure Cartooning – the image as story itself.

This per-panel approach to Cartooning also affects the whole narrative flow: if the stories in 12, with their static camera placements and moment-to-moment transitions, occupy relatively the same space in the page’s pictorial plane, provides a smooth and in a way a more animated read, Ang Maskot’s filmic approach to transitions – the reverse shot, the close-up, the bird’s eye-view, the worm’s eye-view – has its spaces all over the page’s pictorial plane, provides a herky-jerky dynamism to its overall reading experience. One is not necessarily better than the other, but they are different, and can be used complementary.

In a lot of ways, Macoy is the more traditional cartoonist of the two, and in a way the more successful in exploring Cartooning’s many and varied strengths, as method to show the passage of time, the movement of actors in the pictorial plane, to show character and texture and emotion in the least amount of effort, et cetera et cetera. Its only weakness is its underreliance with words – in speech or narration – to the point of needlessness. What little dialogue it has is almost always monosyllabic, almost perfunctory – the book needs words because the komix as a form has to have at least a few words in its pages – and not there to necessarily propel the narrative or even character development, really only offering charming redundancy: it would have been better if it either had no words at all – like 12 – or like in most komix, if it had more than a few per page, offering more than mere “Sigurado kang okey lang yang nasaksak sa’yo?” “Malayo sa bituka ‘to –”. The sheer Cartooning power of the book is really that great.

The most basic element of Komix is Cartooning. Put simply, it is how a drawing ceases to be mere illustration and approaches narrative. It 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. I believe that these two texts, Abrera’s 12 and Macoy’s Ang Maskot, given clear and close readings, will open themselves up for more insights on the finer points of this very delicate very brash art, points even beyond the scope of this essay, points that will only be made clearer, points that will only be made sharper, if applied knowingly, with much awareness, and at the same time, if applied bravely, with much abandon. These are all steps towards our search for – and shaping of – more effective pieces of storytelling.

Next: Narration & Dialogue with Josel Nicolas's Windmills!

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