Bagong Klaseng Komiks?
K2K issue no.1
Story by: Mark Navarro
Art by: Lan Medina
Colors and lettering by: Gilbert Medina
Published by Atlas.
Price: P35.00
Full-color, 32pages
Available at National Bookstore and wherever komiks are sold.
A quick intro on the book’s cast:
THE GOOD GUYS aka K2K aka KATIPUNAN 2000:
Supremo, leader and strong guy, a “Captain America” in military gear.
Sora, Chinese-looking sorceress.
Ladino, the tech-guy, stays at the base to monitor everyone’s progress.
Kalasag, an Am-boy, seems to the brawler of the group, has not yet displayed his superhuman abilities.
Dilubyo, Chinese-looking martial artist, with the ability to generate whirlwinds.
THE BAD GUYS:
Guho, the big boss man in trench coat, sporting some Street Fighter-like punk hairstyle. From the looks of the cover, Guho has to ability to shapeshift into this Thing-like creature, except his rocks are purple.
Latigo, Chinese martial artist, who can make his sleeves elongate and whip people around.
Arson, can fly and project fire from his hands.
Kalinga, their magic-user
So, what happens?
The bad guys, blow up the entrance of Mundo Mall and then seals up everything with a force shield. For some reason, they trash the place and injure a lot of people.
The good guys all gather at Pugad Lawin, their secret base, and they teleport into the mall. Because of some interference caused by the force shield, which turns out to be magical, the team ends up different parts of the mall. As the team tries to regroup, they encounter the bad guys and the issues ends with Kalasag getting blasted by Arson.
It’s “ok” for a first issue.
Story-wise, it’s nice to see that the characters speak in colloquial Filipino and not in that deep Tagalog which is usually found in komiks, Taga-lized anime, and in Culture Crash.
It’s just too bad that there wasn’t enough time given to fleshing out the characters. I know that 32 pages is never enough space to develop a whole team, but the story could have at least focused on one of the characters. For example, could they have focused on Supremo, give the reader an idea why he’s doing all these good deeds. Was he the once who gathered the team? Why was the team put together? Yes, there was a two paragraph intro on the first page, which basically said, the Katipunan of 1892 was organized to fight evil and that a new Katipunan is needed to battle a new type of evil. That still doesn’t explain why this team put together?
Okay, here’s a bad example, in the first issue of WILDC.A.T.S., we meet the team through two people, Emp and Voodoo and we are introduce to the plot that the Kherubs are fighting the Daemonites. Simple. And lots of nifty looking fight scenes happen. In the first issue of STORMWATCH, we are introduced to the concept of StormWatch, a U.N. peacekeeping force that is composed of superhumans. Terrorists attack some Balkan-type country, the team is sent, and we see some nifty fight scenes.
In K2K, we don’t get that (expect for the nifty fight scenes). I just wish a page or two was devoted to giving us an idea on how and why K2K was put together.
I think the inside-front-cover could have been used for the “intro” and just use page 1 to immediately start the story. Instead, the inside-front-cover was used to announce the next issue. Duh!
Art-wise, I think Lan Medina did better work in STONE. His work here seems rushed. Not much detail was put in some of the pages.
Color-wise, I guess this can be considered a milestone as far as komiks are concerned. But, again, I’ve seen Gilbert do better in his other works. Then again, I don’t know if his coloring is limited by the printing process used by Atlas. The colors looks faded.
Take a look at Culture Crash, who also use bookpaper for their inside pages, their colors seem more vibrant, more full, compared to what’s seen in the pages of K2K.
And on the production side, Atlas did a sloppy job in the lay-out and cutting of the book. There were pages which seemed like it was meant to be full-bleed pages, but ended up with some white borders. And then the inside-back-cover was wasted with a repeat of the credits and the copyright requirements. It might have been better if they just put another pin-up or some info about the characters or the schematics of K2K’s secret base or some other “fun factoid” that fanboys drool over.
I just wonder what the regular komiks reader thinks about this book.
I wonder what the regular comic book collector thinks about this book.
I think it’s a good start and hope that it does well in the market, so that Atlas will see the numbers they want to see on the bottom line and hopefully, that would mean, they would produce more books like this, books of better quality compared to the norm of komiks.
The market is now more sophisticated, no matter what “market” they maybe from. Whether they are from the so-called “AB” or “CD” market, they are all exposed to TV shows and movies that offer better stories and visuals. And if komiks today wish to give people the same entertainment value, then it must offer something as good, something better, or something completely different.
The revolution that will change the Filipino comic book industry has yet to begin.