The Philippine Online Chronicles

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

Komix as art and lit is always a slippery discussion for most people invested in the definitions, to say the least: it is a medium that embraces the Benjaminian notion of mechanical production’s negation of art’s aura of value – it is not art because it is mass-produced and ephemeral – but at the same time it increases in value as an artifact as the years go by, a value brought on by its ephemeral nature – it’s an artifact as not a lot of it exists precisely because of its ephemeral origin – and so it goes. My definition of art leans more towards an artisan’s understanding of it, or a journeyman’s: it is something you work on – a job – its only real concrete value dictated by its effectivity as a piece of communiqué, and by the highly subjective yet paradoxically universal notion of “beauty.”

In my book, John Porcellino’s almost abstractly minimalist King Cat is to be regarded with the same awe and respect as Philippe Druillet’s oppressively maximalist monstrosities as well as Eddie Campbell’s realist humanist ink scrawls. In short, it’s a case-by-case basis, the standards dictated by how effective it is in telling you something.

Analyses of komix as art and lit is further compounded by the latter-day occasion that komix, by and large, is a populist medium, much more affected by audience appeal than critical assessment, by market forces than artistic movements, and yet the artist demands a price and respect worthy of his perceived artistic excellence – yet another slippery notion – and oftentimes refuses to let his art mean more than market and authorial intent – yet another slippery notion.

El Indio is a curious example of komix as art and lit. It is a 35-part serial of five-page bits from 1952, of a quasi-revenge-revolution drama of the European bend, much like Alexandre Dumas’ the Count of Monte Cristo, or like the legend of the Man in the Iron Mask (which was the influence for yet another Dumas creation, the Three Musketeers), and thus, much like Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo: considered a mongrel in Imperial Spain, Fernando exiles himself to the Philippines where he finds the colonial situation to be so unbearable that he dons a vigilante persona he dubs “El Indio,” with matching pistols and scarf and a legendary salakot he cribbed from an earlier vigilante called “Sabas, the Barbarian,” who also happens to be his long-lost father.

The story is pure romantic adventure, chockfull of swordfights, gunfights, and bullfights. Early in the book, Fernando as a boy breaks a wild horse he captured himself in the countryside; midway into the book, a more adult Fernando charters a ship to the Philippines steered by a gruff-looking yet subservient captain with an eyepatch; towards the ending, yet another male masked vigilante is revealed to be none other than Fernando’s female romantic interest. Somewhere in between, young sidekicks for the revolution are earned, one of whom slaps a wild bull on the ass, while another is chased out of a coop by a domesticated hen.

And I am glib about the plot in the light of the new millennium’s day, it is rather silly and old, “old” being “nothing new,” “nothing new” being “by the numbers,” and that, ultimately, is just really okay. The writing of the story itself is nothing special, nothing ahead of its time, nothing particularly mind-blowing happens in the captions – albeit it was written, rather obviously, with a bookish bend in mind, it is not quality lit: it is a generic adventure told in imitation “classical” tone, ultimately as vapid and as compelling as the recent Pirates of the Caribbean. What is of interest to me here that this story, from all komix historian’s accounts, had actual mass appeal – even as far as having a movie based off of it a year after it originally concluded, starring no one less than Cesar Ramirez, Tita Muñoz, Nena Cardenas, and Eddie Garcia, directed by National Artist Eddie Romero – and that fact is of interest as it illustrates just how flimsy public opinion really is (local productions of period pieces in mass media have proven to be generally problematic nowadays, as not even Richard Gutierrez could keep people’s interest on a very recent Zorro TV serial), how komix writing almost always loses out to komix art when it comes to standards of quality (only now do we have actual komix that have more-than-decently talented writers, ie, Budjette Tan, Andrew Drilon, as opposed to our range and history of high quality komix artists, ie, Leinil Yu, Carlo Pagulayan, Philip Tan, Roy Allan Martinez, Andrew Drilon (again), all the etc etc of the past ten years or so), and how komix is truly a collaborative medium of words and pictures working together, each’s strengths supporting the other’s weaknesses, all in aid of telling a story, and as such, El Indio pulls this stunt off quite admirably.

Despite its employment of words and pictures for narrative purposes, komix is a medium with mechanisms that are closer to music and poetry than painting and prose: its elements' awareness of each other in their placement on the page, all working in synch to evoke a certain reaction, to tell a certain story, to make the characters move from one action to the other, one turn hingeing on the one preceding it and at the same time anticipating the one next to it, all laid out as a linear track of images albeit also happening all at once – all the words and pictures are on the page, your eyes providing the machine to make them "move." It is a process that operates more on patterns and rhythms - movement and closure: panel one opens, panel two closes – than the more linear (prose) or static (painting) media that constitute the parts that make up its whole.

It's hard not to look at Margarita's page-38-and-39 dance sequence without seeing her actually dancing her seduction dance with Fernando, without hearing busy percussive beats of brass and strings with her arms' every snap and pose – and it's because every movement logically follows the one before it and anticipates the ones next to it, like a particularly skillful nylon string guitar solo, or a really smoothly executed enjambment – it wouldn't have been anything else but what and how the artist laid it on the page, which dives towards the book’s primary strength: page design.

From chapter to page to panel to figure to every unassuming line of ink, El Indio is executed with utterly baroque exuberance, with enthusiasm approaching nothing less than florid vibrance. The art style is, for the most part, realist and representational, having more in common with Juan Luna and Rembrandt, albeit infused with dynamism that approaches Kirby – again, these pictures aren’t mere paintings but actual moving pictures in their own right, the movement not only merely suggested by the McCloudian “closure” in the gutters, but by the actual rendering of the drawings themselves, almost expressionistic. It holds a particular place in visual communication that is strictly in komix territory, communicating in ways only komix could, only rarely seen in this level of maturity and complexity and artistic humility, even (or maybe most especially) today.

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El Indio Images taken from VFI archives. Some rights reserved.

Zorro photo: “03 - March - 2008 -- Zorro” by , c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved.