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Nailbiter
by Fidelis Tan and Mary Ranises
P40
Nailbiter comes from the team that gave us the thoroughly excellent The Girl Who Turned Into A Fish, only with none of the chumminess and more of the latent creepiness, exploited and explored not through Walt-Disney-on-Acid but through a very effective J-Horror aesthetic: of schoolgirls exchanging ghost stories, of dorms haunted by violently-twisted menacing spirits that crawl bleeding hands over bloody feet across the dark floor, of fear as a psychosomatic disease that is terribly contagious and horribly incurable.
Of all of my recent Komikon haul, this was the one that surprised and impressed me the most for what can only be described as its almost in-born, unique, yet very basic understanding of how to tell a story in komix form – and a horror story, at that, that much-maligned genre, always given to narrative cheapness via gore tactics, but seemingly reinvented and reinvigorated here: its mastery of page design, and thus of pace and space and the actual physical process of reading is way way way beyond compare to anyone else working right now, deserving a more thorough analysis by way of its implications and contributions to the form, an analysis I shall be making in a different essay soon, although let these few words suffice as temporary descriptions if only to tide us all over: Nailbiter is the best and the most truly horrific Pinoy horror story I’ve read in the past ten years. This is True Horror. This is not your father’s sentimental ghost calling you from beyond – True Horror is not about comfort. This is not an asuang flying to a rave wearing a silver beltbag – True Horror is not about monsters pretending to be men. True Horror is fear. True Horror is pain. True Horror is seeing the monster and fearing it not because it is alien and it will do horrible things to you, but because it is familiar, because its actions are familiar, because you recognize the monster and its monstrous deeds in yourself. This is what Nailbiter – in all its twelve-page gory glory – is all about.
The komix’s only flaw is, alas, a very very very major one: Nailbiter suffers from utterly unforgivable, utterly dismal production values. To be precise, the komix suffers from a very bad photocopy run, and it is so bad that some panels bordered on becoming unintelligible. The intricate greyscale half-tone colour art lost its nuances as the bad photocopier gave everything the same pallid shade reminiscent of cigarette ash. It is a reminder of the fact that some of a story’s success relies on it actually being physically readable, that sometimes a story fails purely because of shoddy production values. It would do creators well to seek out facilities that’ll help their komix look the clearest, the most legible, and the best they possibly can, if not prep their art to look its clearest, its best (or at the very least, its most legible) regardless of print quality. It’s a learning process founded on trial and error, but it’s fun and well worth the effort. Cheap quality production is available to all, now more than ever, but that if such must be resorted to, the production must not interfere with the clarity of the work.
∴i2.0
by Jake Aboganda and Gabriel Jimenez
P30
This is yet another good komix that is rendered nearly unreadable by bad production values: aside from seemingly sharing the same photocopier that produced Nailbiter, ∴i2.0 employed a very low tech high maintenance variation of zine-binding, that is, ∴i2.0’s pages are all pasted together back to back, recto to verso, instead of shuffled signature-style and secured in the middle with staples.
And this is a very curious choice, the motivation for which I tried to understand but couldn’t. At first I thought it was in the service of the art itself, that maybe the komix was playing around with the formal concept of the double page widescreen spread much like, say, Christian Gossett’s Red Star – a work which is honestly ∴i2.0’s closest aesthetic (computer paints) and narrative (survival in a post-apocalyptic world blanketed by nuclear winter) kin – but even in the first four pages, I immediately realized that that is not the case as the page design is basically normal and sedate, only widescreen in the usual per-panel manner, the double page widescreen spread not even a glimmer in its ambitions.
I then thought that maybe the story itself required that the komix be bound that way for whatever narrative or dramaturgic reason, but to be blunt about it, ∴i2.0 is really just a set of fight scenes rendered across thirty-two pages, and with that concept, I can actually see how one can maybe use the double page widescreen spread as a narrative conceit, and yet the komix barely bothers to even try to tell the story in a deeper way, as it remains superficial (albeit delightfully superficial) throughout. All the setting and character information are reduced to just that, information: they’re not really there to further the story in any special way, they’re just there to be read, and when you do read them, nothing special happens.
And I’m harping on and on about the weird binding because it cripples the whole book as a product: even before I cracked open my copy, its spine was already creased and cracked; the pages were not pasted together properly all the way that there were actual seams on the places the paste did not reach, running the risk of papercut and/or accidentally ripping the pages; the pages were warped throughout precisely because of the choice to use paste as binding material for the pages.
Whatever prompted the creators to do this to the komix basically ruined the experience for me, which is a pity seeing how despite the huge production issues – poor photocopying, awful gluing – the beauty of the art is still very apparent, that despite the typos (the intro had the word “TRANSCENTION” when you know it meant “TRANSCENDENCE,” which is what the komix eventually used in the story proper) and the quirky formal hiccups – like a genetically-enhanced post-human golem thing that roars at the Tetsuo-like (of Akira) protagonist and his roar is conveyed as “ROAAAAAAAR!” and later the golem jumps to chase the protagonist and lands with “CRUNCH!”, which I thought was particularly witty if not nearly innovative in the postmodern sense (which only made me mildly disappointed when the golem, screaming while charging towards the protagonist, did not scream “SCREAAAAAAAM) – despite of all these, I found that∴i2.0 was still a very engaging komix at both the narrative and aesthetic levels.
The story is basically the stuff of passé scifi: set in a war-torn landscape in a post-apocalyptic world, a global corporation set itself up as the saviour of what little population is left of mankind via mutation and augmentation of their bodies to adapt to living in the barren planet, achieving what they call Transcendence, only there are some people who fail to Transcend instead turning into misshapen nomads who wander the scorched earth preaching the anti-gospel against Transcendence. ∴i2.0 is a snippet from that world, a set of fight scenes between one of the misshapen nomads and an army working for the global corporation.
To echo what I said a few paragraphs above, it’s all very superficial: the global corporation is by default “evil” as it aims to dehumanize, the misshapen nomads “good” as they’re fighting against the global corporation, by implication fighting for humanity. No real narrative texture or expansion occurs beyond that, no mention of the possibility that the global corporation just may be behind the nuclear winter, no elaboration on the issues of posthumanity or the blending of Theology with Technology, etc etc. I call it passé as it really is passé, the only thing saving it from dismissal is the beautiful digital paints art, or again, what remains legible of what seems to be beautiful art.
All in all, ∴i2.0 is a book that’s pleasantly simplistic, singular about its goal and how to get there, making it all the more effective as a book, albeit riddled with crippling production problems that get in the way of actual appreciation that doesn’t require the reader to squint at the pages. I hope the creators fix these issues for their next printrun, and I hope the creators at least do three or five more issues of the book, as the story itself – the way it’s drawn, the way it’s told – deserves far better treatment than this.
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