The Philippine Online Chronicles

For a fan of komiks, there is no greater feeling than stumbling across a previously unknown work and getting blown away. So far, the gem of this year's Komikon has been Askals, by Dodo Dayao and Bong Leal. Of course, in some cases, a work only remains unknown to me because I haven't been paying attention: the pair had received raves before, and a few months back, at the indie komplex forums, Josel Nicolas mentioned the team of Dayao and Leal amongst his list of the most original and daring indie creators in the komiks scene today.

"Punch to the gut writing and gritty noir aesthetic and filmic storytelling," he said. "Ever since reading Askals, Dugo and Noisy blood, I've been in serious remission from their absence from the scene. Bong Leal has so far been able to capture the real pinoy setting better than anyone. Dodo Dayao's words focus and add flourish to the art, making them bar none one of the strongest collaborators in the scene." Coming from a respected komiks creator like Nicolas, that's high praise indeed, and upon reading the collected edition of Askals, I heartily agree.

The art is the first thing that you'll notice when you pick up the book--the cover design is excellent, and the interior illustrations are rich in detail. When Leal draws a wall he captures not only its shape, but every gouge in the brick, every tear in the wallpaper; when he draws a shoot out, you'll see individual bullets fly past, small pieces of the wall fly off, individual playing cards scattered on the floor. As you might expect, his action scenes are frenetic, frozen slices of chaos, and you can help but go back to them after you've finished the komik and try to digest everything that's going on. What makes these scenes even more beautiful is that they are choreographed--they have a flow to them which takes you from one panel to the next, giving you a thread to hold on to in the turmoil; in one part of the climactic shootout he uses a spinning, firing, gun to provide continuity, and it works very well.

With such artwork, it would be easy for the writing to be rendered superfluous, or in the worst case, obstructive, but Dayao manages to add instead of detract. Most graphic fiction struggles to find a harmony between words and pictures, and Dayao knows when words must take center stage, and when the art must speak for itself. There is a poetry to the narration and a naturalness to the dialogue that, to my inexpert "ears" at least, do not sound forced. The dialogue, both internal and external, is excellently done, even the taunting of the "villains" (although they are merely the ones on the farthest end of a scale of evil - the komik isn't about black-and-white morality) manages to be witty, which is a rare and precious thing in komiks. And the climax of the book (I don't want to give too much away), which easily could have degenerated into melodramatic pontification at the hands of a lesser writer, is almost completely free of words, but what words are present neatly punctuate the scene.

The book is not perfect: I'm not sure if changes were made from the earlier version of the komik, but I did notice the difference in inking between sections that Gerry Alanguilan mentioned in 2005. There were a few parts where I could see pencil lines which should have been erased but were not, and perhaps more steps could have been taken to make the participants in the final shootout to be more distinct from each other. The final page of the komik also eliminates any possible sense of closure the reader may have felt, and while I'm happy that means we may see more stories in this world, it means that I can't quite view the komik as a complete and finished product. But the strengths of Askals more than offset its weaknesses.

What makes Askals more than the sum of its parts for me is that it achieves a sense of time and place that is absent from many other works. The problem with some stories (komiks and prose) is that they never seem to feel like they're occurring in a real place, even if they are set in an actual location, such as Manila; they give off the sense that they were fabricated on a nameless soundstage, with two dimensional backdrops and cardboard cut-out people. Askals is grounded in its chosen setting--Quiapo, circa the late nineties/early 2000s (Askals is not a new work, having been released in 2005, or perhaps even earlier, as one might guess from the cassette tapes in Moran's room)--and the creators, particularly Leal, immerse the reader in that setting: from the sidewalk stalls, to the Lipat Bahay signs, to a crumpled tansan, Askals recreates a familiar world, and allows us to wonder at what may lie beneath it.

Breakdown:

It's about… drug addicts, secret organizations, corrupt policemen, supernatural beings, a little girl, and the intersection of lives in a rundown apartment complex.

The language is… Filipino, with a few sentences in English.

It tastes like… a Quentin Tarantino movie, shot in Quiapo.