Babbling Point

Lights! Camera! Pasta! If you click here , you'll see Noel F. Lim aka FLIM, me, and Gerry at Italianni's, Greenbelt 2.We met there to practice my scene with Gerry for WASTED THE MOVIE. I arrived around 6:30pm. For some reason, Noel was wearing his motorcycle goggles, which is weird because he sold his bike years ago. I guess he misses it. We started our "reading" / workshop after dinner. I thought we'd go elsewhere to practice our lines and try-out the blocking of the scene. But we didn't. And I'm just glad the place was full of people and noisy, else they would've heard me bumbling around and Gerry cursing about love lost. We did two readings, enough to figure out which lines needed to be edited and got directions from Noel on how to say this line and that line. Noel also started to sketch some ideas on how to shoot the scene. He said he wants to shoot the scene in one continous shot! No cuts! Which means it's going to be a very long da...

an email from Paolo Manlapaz Jonnel was a quiet, simple, unassuming person. He didn't stand out in a crowd or draw attention to himself. He may have looked timid, but if you pierced that disguise, you'd find that he could be fiery and passionate about many things. During our elementary and high school years, I would often spend weekends with Jonnel, either at his Malabon or Xavierville residence. Day and night, we'd fight ninja warriors in Legend of Kage, listen to When In Rome's The Promise, and walk around Virramall in Greenhills. We'd go through his stacks of Teen Titans, watch veritechs dogfight on Robotech, and strafe Kilrathi ships in Wing Commander. We'd drink those pulpy Japanese orange drinks that came in aluminum cans. We'd draw (hopefully) like Ryoichi Ikegami. When we'd play with miniatures, we'd make ridiculous battle sound effects. It was all simple, honest fun and it didn't get better than that. Over the last few ye...

Filipino comic book writer J.Torres will be one of the contributors to an upcoming issue of X-MEN UNLIMITED . I asked him how he got that writing gig. Below is his answer. My first Marvel gig was a text piece in Marvel Knights: Millennial Visions edited by Mike Marts. I first met Mike when he was an associate editor at Acclaim about three or four years ago. I was supposed to do some work for them, but the company's comic division folded before that happened. After Millennial Visions, Mike asked me to write a two-part Black Panther fill-in (which will probably never get used given the series' problems). Around the time I was finishing up that assignment, C.B. Cebulski was offered a position at Marvel. C.B. was my editor at Fanboy Entertainment, the company that originally published Sidekicks. He was initially brought on to manage the Mangaverse books. But about three months into his tenure he was assigned as the assistant editor of X-Men Unlimited, and at the time Mike wa...

Not a hoax. Not a dream. Not an imaginary story. I just received a text that Jonnel Mendiola, a batch mate from Ateneo died yesterday in an attempted kidnapping incident . I met Jonnel because we were the geeks that hung out at the covered courts, not to play basketball, but to talk about comic books. (Of course, Jonnel was usually at the covered courts because he was part of Ateneo Rifle&Pistol team.) After college, Jonnel set-up a comic book store and was one of the people to support Alamat Comics during our early years. God bless Jonnel. God bless his family. God bless our country.