The Philippine Online Chronicles

This interview is part of The Secret Origins Interview Series, which will be featuring various local comics creators and other interesting personalities. First up is Elbert Or is the creator of Bakemono High and the More the Manyer (and its sequel Without Further Adieu). He has also edited and been involved in various comics anthologies including Love and Heartbreak, the National Book Award-winning Siglo: Freedom, and its sequel Siglo: Passion. He also worked as artist of the graphic novel Lola, published by Oni Press and available around the world.

POC: How long have you been reading comics?

I’ve been reading comics for as long as I remember. I read newsstand comics like Funny Comics and Bata Batuta. I think it was from my mom who thought it was a cheap way to keep me quiet. But after a while I wasn’t content with them anymore, because newsstand comics tend to be very thin. I started reading Richie Rich comics digests or Archie double digests. They presented such a volume of reading material.

POC: What did you like and not like about these comics?

I was actually very indiscriminate about what I read. I’d just pretty much read whatever I could get my hands on, since I wasn’t the one paying anyway. I could try out Spiderman, or Namor, or “Who’s this flying man in briefs? Okay, I’ll just buy it”. Whatever I could get away with buying. That said, I wasn’t raised like “Let’s buy all the most expensive books in the world.”

I grew up mostly on a steady diet of Filipino newsstand comics because at the time, they were around P6 or P8. It was either those or Archie. Because Archie was around a P80 or a P100 at the time. It was worth the price.

POC: So when did you actually start making comics?

I started making comics as early as grade school where I very quickly found out that you could make money from them, because after I’d make the comics, I’d xerox them and then sell them to classmates .

The selling point then--the high concept was--these superhero characters that I’d make up were the alter egos of my classmates. So for them it was a thrill that I was drawing them as adults who looked like Clark Kent or whoever I was copying at the time. They’d think “Ah, I look so Caucasian and adult, and I’m working in a media company and I’m a superhero.”

So I’d ask for like P5, and that was enough to get me dingdongs or oishi crackers. I was encouraged by that because at the time my parents were never the sort who gave allowances. They were the sort who gave you baon, or waited for you at lunchtime outside of the school to give you your food. So in their heads there was no reason to give us our own money because everything we’d need was provided for.

But of course there were certain purchases which would be embarrassing to ask them to make like, “Can you buy me junk food?” Junk food was unheard of in my house. So the fact that I was making my own money made me very happy.

In High School, I was known as someone who’d write love letters for friends for P10. I had a seasonal enterprise where I’d either sell love letters, or the stationery to write letters on.

POC: Did anyone teach you how to make comics?

I had the misfortune of studying in a Chinese school where in the hierarchy of priorities, art is somewhere below recess. It wasn’t that it was unimportant, just that art wasn’t even on the radar.

So art was never a consideration. It was very indicative that when I joined the student council (the teacher who kept catching me make kodigos kept telling me off, but when I showed my good side I joined the student council) I had to form my own committee for me to be happy. I made my own publications committee, and I was publications head. They didn’t have that before.

We took care of bulletin boards and announcements and stuff, basically blind items for student and teachers. There was no publications arm before that. There was a school paper but it was mostly just a venue for teachers to publish the best essays in class, or advertise the achievements of students.

POC: So when did you start making comics seriously?

Not until college. I had classmates who read comics, they were the ones who introduced me to superhero books and graphic novels, but not until college. Grade school and high school was just the time for me to get into trouble.

But then, if I were pre-disposed to regretting things, I’d probably regret college a lot. Mostly because of that feeling that I didn’t maximize my college life.

Back in 4^th year, I got caught by a teacher drawing at the back of a textbook in class. Because those textbooks were really nice, there were always four or five pages in the back which were blank.

The teacher told me never to draw in class again—“that’s bad,” he said. But a while later he asked me if I wanted to draw for the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF). By then, I was in first year college. The same teacher who caught me apparently also worked for the WWF and they needed an artist for a poster. So I did that, and then I got paid. So that was professional work. I got it because misbehaved, which I’m sure is not a good moral to teach my kids.

After that I became more excited about working, because compared to school where my parents had to shell out money, here, I could do stuff that brings in money. For me, it was a no brainer. I even shifted out of engineering just so I could take less units and do more stuff.

I originally took up electronics communications engineering (ECE) because at the time my mom said to me, “You’re an artist you’ll starve, you might as well be an engineer,” and I thought, I guess that’s fine, I like physics, physics is easy. It had lots of physics units. But because I started working, I shifted to Interdisciplinary Studies (IS), because it was the only course that would credit the units I already took, and I could still graduate on time.

So because of that I don’t think I learned as much as I should have and I don’t think I was able to cultivate as strong a social circle as I could have. I look at my social network now, and the people I consider friends are either really old farts who I met through work, or really young kids like my students. I don’t have any peers.

Parts two can be found here.