The Philippine Online Chronicles

The first lesson that many children learn in school has nothing do with math or language, history or science… well, not the physical sciences at least. The first lesson comes in discovering the existence of hierarchies, a pecking order, in the beginnings of the barkadas and cliques that become so destructive and stifling when they grow older. At a young age, however, status is established less by such intangibles as beauty, connections, charm or “cool,” and more by athletic prowess, reckless courage… and, of course, who has the best toy. The toy “arms race” in which young children enthusiastically engage is the source of headaches for parents and riches for manufacturers, but it’s a process by which children first begin to form their attitude toward conformity that is so important to the healthy development of their relationships with their peers.

This is the world of childhood to which we are re-introduced in the komik Supervillains by Dino Copreros (a member of Studio Kakomiks), under his Laging Bata label. Released at this year’s Summer Komikon, it’s a bit of a throwback to an earlier type of comic geared towards children, and while it is executed well, it hews closely enough to that target audience that older readers will find little to engage them, with the possible exception of Copreros’s art.  (You can see the first few pages of the comic at Laging Bata multiply site.)

When I speak of Supervillains as an earlier type of comic, I have in mind those occasional educational forays into the paneled world, where neat little tales with clear moral lessons were packaged in comics-form and made required reading for students, frequently in the forms of the lives of saints or heroic historical figures. Written in Filipino, Supervillains tells the tale of Lester, a boy who is celebrating his 15th birthday but is being plagued by dreams that he is being attacked by superheroes--yes, the heroes, not the villains. The reason for this becomes obvious as the story takes us into Lester’s past, showing how he used to be teased and bullied because he was too poor to buy a superhero action figure that would allow him to join his peers at play, and then shows us the transformation that Lester undergoes when a well-meaning stranger buys him an action figure of his own--one which was not the character anyone else would have wanted.

As something of a “morality lesson” for children, the plot is straightforward--no twists are brought into the story, although the ending is a bit confusing because the characters repeat much of their dialogue from an earlier scene, but no mention is made of this repetition. The story’s main goal seems to be to drive home a message, and that influences the style in which the story is told. There is a lot of exposition in the comic, narration that in a tale for older audiences would not be necessary because the reader will be assumed to be able to infer things like the character’s emotional state based on the character’s facial expression, or the construction of the panel, or simply by placing themselves in the character’s shoes. The use of exposition also, in one instance, obviated the need for more sophisticated modes of transition from scene to scene (a caption merely states “Flashback muna tayo…”).

While I’m not certain if this level of exposition is still a necessary set of “training-wheels” today, even for children, the story does a good job in portraying the simple-minded cruelty that children are capable of. That being said, the adult reader will likely find the exposition pedantic, and as unnecessary as Copreros's frequent use of three exclamation points in a row.

Even adults, however, will find something to enjoy in the art, which Gerry Alanguilan in his review called "accomplished cartooning." Copreros is a good cartoonist--Alanguilan reveals that Copreros worked for GASI)--more so than one might originally surmise from the cover. The problem with the cover (aside from being somewhat misrepresenting the comic in that it doesn’t appear to be aimed at children) is that it prominently features one weak point in his art--his portrayal of the costumed characters. When rendering the more prosaic scenes, not involving the superheroes, Copreros’ art is more detailed and (ironically) more dynamic. He also deploys a wide variety of perspectives and panel types, so that even when people are conversing at a table, the scene is made interesting because of the variation of the points-of-view from which the reader views the scene, and the changes in panel layouts from page to page. That being said, however, sometimes there’s a bit too much change, as Copreros seems to render Lester’s face slightly differently from scene to scene (understandable when distinguishing younger Lester from older Lester, but not when there’s only a gap of a day or two between scenes). Aside from the aforementioned superheroes (who would have benefited from more detail, either as toys or “real” persons), 15-year-old Lester and his friends look more like adults than teens in their first party scene (pages 3 and 4), although part of that may be the context (they look like they’re in a beerhouse).

I’d like to see Copreros try his hand at a comic without such an overt message, but as it stands, Supervillains makes for an amusing tale that young children may enjoy, as long as they don’t mind the moral lesson being spelled out for them.

Supervillains is available at Comic Odyssey, Robinsons Galleria and Sputnik Fantastik Comics.