THESIS STATEMENTS

A year will not pass without us being interviewed by a student for his report of thesis. It started early this year as I was interviewed by a student from AIM who was making a business case about local comic book publishing. More specifically, his thesis was about studying the current comic book market and determine what kind of comic book is the market looking for and to create a comic book to cater to that market.

To which I asked, “Isn’t that called, SELLING OUT?”

He smiled and said, “Well, I hope to be able to synthesize everything I find out and still come up something that doesn’t look like a sell out comic book.”

Like with every interview for a report or thesis, they would usually ask, How’d you start? What are you influences? What were the problems you encountered when you started your business?

And so it becomes another episode of THIS IS YOUR LIFE and you are forced to remember the mistakes of the past, while trying to force yourself to smile and joke about the flops and failures of trying to set-up a comic book business.

There was an episode of TWLIGHT ZONE where a stand-up comedian ends up in his own version of hell: to do stand-up in a lounge in hell, but instead of telling jokes, he has to tell everyone all the sins he ever did because that’s what they find funny.

As to why I just remembered that I just don’t know.

Is there a similarity between that and these interviews that I do?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Sorry that I’m in this mood.

16 days into the New Year and it feels like we’ve already 16 weeks worth of work.

At least I got to finish a comic book script.

The trick is to get it published.

The past year was definitely one of the most active years of the comic book scene. Things are building up… to something. Something great, I hope. Something that will be sustained. That the scene just keep on growing `til people can’t help but notice all the great works being made my Filipino comic book writers and artists.

I really need to get out the gutters.

I’m stuck in between panels.

I really need to loose weight.

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"You bleed onto the page. This is your lifeblood. Minutes and hours and days and years of your life, transmuted into letters and words and sentences. A scattering of drops, globules of plasma. Punctuation. Period. Umlaut.

"In the end, perhaps this is all you have to show for yourself. Your whole, messy life, smeared across the white pages that stop you from hemorrhaging."

from David Hontiveros' PUSOD HA RAGAT

Feels like he was also talking about making ads. In the end, what do you have to show? A couple of tearsheets, some commercials which some people considered cool for 30 seconds.

There must be something more to all of this.

A funny thing happened on the way to Endor.... or, that's what happens when you smoke that Ewok weed.

Wow... never knew this issue came out. I think Jobert told me about this site but never got to check it out.

You can even buy Leia's metal bikini if you want to. Wonder if anyone will dress up in this at the SCI FI CON this weekend. :)

Got to watch half of THE GATHERING last night. During the first half of the movie, I was running around the mall trying to look for my lost car park card. I never found the card and had to pay P230 to get out of the mall. So, by the time I got in the movie, I missed most of the set-up, which was okay since Dang and Doris told us about the premise of the movie, which was the main reason we watched that instead of ROTK. (Well, we watched ROTK Saturday night anyway.)

THE GATHERING felt like a extra-long episode of THE TWLIGHT ZONE. Well, it was more like that episode of RAY BRADBURY MYTSERY THEATER called THE CROWD, where a mysterious crowd would always appeared whenever there was a car accident. Turns out "the crowd" was composed of people who had died in other accidents and were "acquiring" more members by making sure that people in other auto accidents die.

In THE GATHERING, that concept is taken to a Biblical scale, where a "crowd" gathers at every major catastrophe in human history. Interesting idea, but not worth a whole movie, I think. Something you'd watch on Cinemax on a boring Saturday afternoon.