The Philippine Online Chronicles

Summit Media’s first graphic anthology, Underpass, presents a solid collection of stories but falls short of the mark. It's a good-looking package --the book itself is pleasing to look at and leaf through: full color, good paper, unlikely to flake pages after a few readings (unlike many other local graphic novels). It is also contains the creations of Philippine comics luminaries  Gerry Alanguilan (site), Budjette Tan (blog), Kajo Baldisimo (blog), Oliver Pulumbarit (blog), Ian Sta. Maria (gallery) and Palanca award winning writer David Hontiveros (blog). Despite the undisputed talent of the creators, the end product (with the exception of one story) still left a bit to be desired.

Underpass is meant to be a horror anthology--four different stories in four different styles, delving into the dark and creepy--but I found little that was actually scary. All the concepts certainly had the potential to scare, but none gave the truly satisfying chill that comes from reading a good bit of horror. The stories in the collection do make you think ‘that’s an interesting idea’ or ‘that’s pretty disturbing’, but these are cerebral reactions. Good horror evokes something visceral--disgust, or dread.

(Warning: Spoiler Alert)

In terms of art, there is little to complain about. Each art style used presents a different flavor, setting up a distinct atmosphere for every story. There is also some truly striking imagery to be found--a bloody apparition, a butterfly-winged manananggal, a jeepney to the netherworld. Besides some nuances in layout (ie. Judas Kiss), visuals aren’t a problem in this collection. But it takes more than good imagery to hook a reader by the throat and draw them deep into the dark.

SIM

The first story in the collection follows a man who finds a SIM card in the bus and puts it in his phone, only to receive a series of strange calls and messages that eventually lead him to a dire fate. The idea of a common, harmless item, like a SIM card, being haunted or cursed has provided the backbone of many a hair-raising tale. Nonetheless, it remains a compelling concept--would you pick up a SIM card you just found lying around? Alanguilan’s heavily-penned character work is rendered in gritty, saturated colors that provide a sense of familiarity to the backdrop, as well as a sense of immediacy to the protagonist's plight.

The text, in contrast, was not quite able to evoke the proper atmosphere. By the way the character is written, you understand that he’d like to have a girlfriend (and that he displaces this desire to the woman on the phone), but he seems to be more confused than concerned that he’s receiving messages from a woman screaming for help. The story was not able to delve into the potential dread that might come with repeated calls that don’t make sense, or blurry pictures that gradually clear into something horrible.

The story’s pacing brought enough tension for the reader to wonder what would happen next, but at eight pages, one wishes something else, or something more, would have happened. Instead, SIM ends up a conventional horror story which went down an expected course.

Judas Kiss

Judas Kiss is an interesting experience. The jarring, shifting colors have a disquieting effect – perfectly appropriate for the bizarre story being told. It involves a man who repeatedly finds himself being kissed, all over, and repeatedly by an invisible assailant he suspects to be his dead wife. All the while, a strange figure wrapped in bloody bed sheets watches quietly. There is a disturbing—satisfyingly so—twist at the end which makes the story a worthwhile read.

And there is a lot of reading involved, which unfortunately diminishes the effect of the comics. The script was based on a short story written by Hontiveros, but while a liberal use of wordage is acceptable in prose, it isn’t always so in the medium of comics. There are points during the story, during the climactic scene, for instance, which might have been better left to the pictures rather than words (or, at least, with less words).

It doesn’t help that the words are encased in such ugly caption boxes. The font used and the coloration of the boxes, distract from--rather than add to--the effect made by the changing color palate, the drawings, and the increasingly maddened “ravings” of the main character as he faces his personal demons.

Katumbas

The pictures in this story, by virtue of shadowing and the severity of the linework, immediately suggest a dark, grim, smoky world. The very same effect and art style can be found in Sta. Maria’s work on ‘Skyworld’, his graphic novel with Mervin Ignacio.

The majority of the story takes place in an underpass where a series of suicides draws the attention of a supernatural avenger who takes the battle to the evil forces at work there. This is less a horror story than an action or adventure story, albeit one that deals with malevolent spirits. The high point of the comic is a fight between the avenger Kadasig and the shapeshifting Candenando, a sequence that deserves to be seen if only for the artfully haphazard arrangement of panels.

Reading the rest of the story, the reader gets the sense that this is just a tiny slice of a much wider mythology – that this is just a single night’s work for Kadasig and his talking tattoo. The effect is a lot of questions are raised which are not necessarily answered by the end of the comics’ 12 page run. For instance, what exactly is Kadasig? What do his tattoos signify? And why can Kadasig pull a sword out of his spine?

While on one level these questions intrigue, and makes one wonder if we’ll one day see Kadasig in a comic book of his own, they also steal the attention from what is actually happening in the story--that there is a dangerous creature in the underpass that feeds off the hollow desires of human beings--and that's a problem with a story which is so short in the first place.

The Clinic

The Clinic sees the familiar team of Tan and Baldisimo make something that isn’t ‘Trese.’

Lyn is a starlet set for the higher echelons of Filipino show business, until she discovers that she’s pregnant. Her manager, the ambiguously named Tita Lola, tells her that her only choice is an abortion at a clinic run by a character who may or may not be a twisted reimagining of Vicki Belo.

To me, this is the most fully-executed story of the four (and you can read a full preview here or here), just because it seamlessly marries the dreamlike quality of Baldisimo’s light, airbrushed images to the irrevocably showbiz backdrop of Lyn’s encounter with the supernatural. The story offers an unforeseen turn-around--just when you thought the worst thing Lyn would have to face was a tiyanak, you are greeted with a pleasant surprise: that there are more frightening things than unborn babies. The incidents that occur while Lyn is unconscious at the titular Clinic evoke a variety of reactions, among them the morbid wonder and mild disgust of good horror. The idea it leaves with the reader is the sort that persists long after you’ve put the book down, and this is a phenomena which, depending on how you look at it, is the worst or best thing that a horror story can do.

(Image source: http://www.summitgraphicnovels.com.ph/)