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It’s a quiet day today in Harrison.
Yesterday, or I should say this morning, I left the office around 2am and Joey and the others were still putting together the presentation materials for the Greenwich pitch.
Almost 12 hours later, Joey, Russ, and Jeorge stumbled back into the office and said the presentation went well. The panel laughed at all the right place, Taps texted. We can only hope and pray that we did well enough. Last week was the Evervon pitch and we lost that account to Lowe.
Next month, we begin work on what I’d like to call PROJ: HAPPY NEW YEAR (although I’m sure it’ll be boiled down to a one-word project-name). Now that’s going to be exciting and challenging and probably will be twice as difficult as the past two pitches combined. If we’re lucky, our weekends won’t be eaten up by the work, which is what happened this past month.
Which is why, last Saturday, I met up with David and Kajo in Makati, then drove to the Komikon, where we set-up the Alamat / Visprint table. Then I had to drive back to Makati, type up my scripts, present to the big boss, slip-out of the meeting while the rest of the team presented, drive back to the Komikon and arrived just in time to see everyone leaving.
I wish I was able to stay the whole day and spend more time meeting people and hang out with the “old comic book veterans”. But the hour or so that I spent there was enough to say hi, hello, and catch-up with the people who dropped by out table.
Seeing the entire ground floor of the U.P. Bahay ng Alumni full of comic book creators and comic book collectors / readers / fanboys and fangirl made me think about Alamat’s first exhibit in Robinsons Galleria. Ten years ago, I thought we were already able to gather a big crowd. Back then, I thought, if we were able to bring that much people in one place, we had a sizeable enough market to sustain our comic book creations. Things didn’t really turn out to be the “Hollywood success story” we hoped it would be, but we’re still around. Maybe we’ve learned enough lessons in the past ten years to finally make things work.
What the Komikon accomplished last Saturday has made me hopeful that our little comic book scene can still become a thriving industry-- like the way it was, some 30 or 40 years ago.
A lot has changed in the past ten years: we now have publishers who have taken interest in publishing original Filipino graphic novels. Like it or not, the telefantasyas of ABS-CBN and GMA have re-opened the minds of the Pinoy to more fantastic stories. TV shows like “Nginig” and “Kabaka kaba”, as well as the True Philippine Ghost Stories, have helped spark interest in supernatural stories. And then there’s Hollywood’s mining of the comic book stories, which have brought the spotlight on not just the superheroes, but indie comic books as well. So maybe, just maybe, there’s a better chance that today’s readers will be more interested, more open, in picking up graphic novels with stories about the fantastic, the supernatural, and the super heroic. Or what we can hope for, thanks to all of these things happening, is that the non-readers would be more interested in picking up a comic book in the first place.
It’s a quiet day today in Harrison.
Yesterday, or I should say this morning, I left the office around 2am and Joey and the others were still putting together the presentation materials for the Greenwich pitch.
Almost 12 hours later, Joey, Russ, and Jeorge stumbled back into the office and said the presentation went well. The panel laughed at all the right place, Taps texted. We can only hope and pray that we did well enough. Last week was the Evervon pitch and we lost that account to Lowe.
Next month, we begin work on what I’d like to call PROJ: HAPPY NEW YEAR (although I’m sure it’ll be boiled down to a one-word project-name). Now that’s going to be exciting and challenging and probably will be twice as difficult as the past two pitches combined. If we’re lucky, our weekends won’t be eaten up by the work, which is what happened this past month.
Which is why, last Saturday, I met up with David and Kajo in Makati, then drove to the Komikon, where we set-up the Alamat / Visprint table. Then I had to drive back to Makati, type up my scripts, present to the big boss, slip-out of the meeting while the rest of the team presented, drive back to the Komikon and arrived just in time to see everyone leaving.
I wish I was able to stay the whole day and spend more time meeting people and hang out with the “old comic book veterans”. But the hour or so that I spent there was enough to say hi, hello, and catch-up with the people who dropped by out table.
Seeing the entire ground floor of the U.P. Bahay ng Alumni full of comic book creators and comic book collectors / readers / fanboys and fangirl made me think about Alamat’s first exhibit in Robinsons Galleria. Ten years ago, I thought we were already able to gather a big crowd. Back then, I thought, if we were able to bring that much people in one place, we had a sizeable enough market to sustain our comic book creations. Things didn’t really turn out to be the “Hollywood success story” we hoped it would be, but we’re still around. Maybe we’ve learned enough lessons in the past ten years to finally make things work.
What the Komikon accomplished last Saturday has made me hopeful that our little comic book scene can still become a thriving industry-- like the way it was, some 30 or 40 years ago.
A lot has changed in the past ten years: we now have publishers who have taken interest in publishing original Filipino graphic novels. Like it or not, the telefantasyas of ABS-CBN and GMA have re-opened the minds of the Pinoy to more fantastic stories. TV shows like “Nginig” and “Kabaka kaba”, as well as the True Philippine Ghost Stories, have helped spark interest in supernatural stories. And then there’s Hollywood’s mining of the comic book stories, which have brought the spotlight on not just the superheroes, but indie comic books as well. So maybe, just maybe, there’s a better chance that today’s readers will be more interested, more open, in picking up graphic novels with stories about the fantastic, the supernatural, and the super heroic. Or what we can hope for, thanks to all of these things happening, is that the non-readers would be more interested in picking up a comic book in the first place.