A sign of things to come: Gerry Alanguilan's Wasted

wated The first time I read Gerry Alanguilan’s cult classic Wasted, I was blown away.

This was the collected work first published in 1998 by Alamat Comics, with my brother managing to score one of the 500 copies they printed. The first time I read it, I found Alanguilan’s story of the tormented Eric disturbingly funny. At the same time, I was greatly impressed by the quality of his artwork.

(In my younger days, I loved reading local comic books, ranging from the classic barbershop komiks to the newer stapled and photocopied works. This was the first time I encountered the quality publications of Budgette Tan, et al. in Alamat Comics. But I digress.)

In Wasted, Alanguilan writes the dark tragicomic tale of Eric, a young musician whose obsessive nature starts him on a destructive spiral of madness and revenge when his father, a judge, is killed and his girlfriend, Jenny, breaks off their relationship. Unfortunately, his rage won’t let him die so easily. Armed with a gun, Eric decides to deal with life’s intransigence—whether petty annoyances or grave injustices—with the same deadly approach.

I say this story is tragicomic but it’s also a kind of horror story because Alanguilan draws Eric as one whose moral qualms have been wiped away by depression and his personal anger at the world. This makes it easy for him to use violence on those people that draw his wrath, whether it’s the obnoxious religious preacher at his door, the pickpocket he catches red-handed, or the politician who killed his father.

This sense of horror—of the darkness of the human soul—is what draws the laughter from us, even as it disturbs us. After all, who among us has not sweetly imagined wringing the neck of those people that offend us, even as we pray for patience and tolerance? But such laughter soon peters out in the face of Eric’s heavy-handed style of drawing the truth from the people he meets—at the barrel of the gun and with a trail of broken hearts and bodies.

I was so taken by Alanguilan’s comic book after I finished reading it that I lent it to a friend of mine… who then lost it. Though my friend was apologetic enough for being forgetful, there was still a lot of gnashing of teeth on my part. (No, I didn’t imagine killing him. But it was close.) I suppose even then, I knew that Alanguilan would go far in the world of comic book publishing and that a first printing like this would grow in monetary value in the future (as such works are wont to do).

Fast-forward thirteen years later, when I first heard that Alanguilan’s latest output, Elmer (the story of a family of chickens living in the world of humans) had received the Prix Asie-ACBD award in France. This announcement was made last June 30 during the recent Japan Expo.

As awards go, the Prix Asie-ACBD is pretty impressive, given by a group of French comic critics and journalist (the Association des Critiques et des journalists de Bande Dessinee) to the best Asian comic books published in France. Alanguilan managed to beat 1,500 other comic books published in France, most of them done by Japanese comic book artists. (Obviously, the French and the Japanese take their comic books seriously so you can see why Elmer winning this award is pretty awesome.)

It’s no surprise that Alanguilan would win such accolade. After all, since he came out with Wasted, he’s become an inker with the US comic book industry’s top publishers: Marvel, DC and Image. He’s done collaborations with artists like Whilce Portacio and Leinil Francis Yu and worked on comic books like Wetworks, Grifter, Ironman, X-Force, Wolverine, X-Men, Superman, Incredible Hulk and Ultimate Avengers. He’s also done illustrated work of classic stories for Graphic Classics, from Bram Stoker to Rafael Sabatini to O Henry and Edgar Allan Poe.

You could say that Alanguilan is continuing the tradition of early Filipino comic book artists like Tony Zuñiga, Nestor Redondo and Alex Niño who had created komiks for Filipinos readers and then later started working with US comic books.

What’s amazing about re-reading Wasted thirteen years later is that it stands up very well to the passage of time. Even Alanguilan’s rendition of the city mayor involved in the death of Eric’s father as a certain ex-president still goes down as amusingly believable.

Moreover, you can see Alanguilan’s potential in Wasted as both artist and writer in full flower in Elmer, whether it’s the clear, clean lines of his art or the very human stories of Eric and Elmer. This is supported by praise given by popular comic book writer Warren Ellis, who described Wasted as “an early work by a potentially brilliant creator”.

You can actually draw Alanguilan’s progression as an artist between the two works, Wasted and Elmer. In Wasted, there’s a lack of depth to the art unlike in Elmer with its panels that seem to burst out with detail. There’s also a certain stiltedness to the action scenes in Wasted that Alanguilan has managed smoothen out in Elmer.

But both in Wasted and Elmer, you can see Alanguilan has managed to decipher the art of drawing the human face in all its suffering glory. In Wasted, even though Eric comes across as an emo git at times, you can’t help but empathize with the pain writ on his face.

It’s plainly evident that Alanguilan drew from a deep, hidden part of him in creating Wasted. No matter how you feel about Eric’s heartbreak, you’ll have to admit that the artist knows the depths of pain in order to write or draw about it.

Maybe that’s the power of Alanguilan’s work: he draws from his sincerity and passion to create incredible comic books like Wasted and Elmer. From what I’ve seen, it’ll definitely take him far.

Gerry Alanguilan was a special guest during the 7th Philippine Annual Komiks Convention (Komikon) held last November 19 at the Bayanihan Center, Pasig City.