Skip to main content
.

Tongue-tied

I recently received an email from a senior college student, studying in a one of Manila’s major universities. She was doing a report on Filipino comic books for her journalism class and here was her list of questions:

1. How does comic affects its readers?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of comics through its readers?
3. When and where does comic-making start in the Philippines?
4. Today, how was the comic industry surviving in the competitive business of media?
5. What is the current status of Filipino-made comics?
6. Nowadays, some of the comics were created as an animation or movie. Does this process helps the comic industry to live by?
7. I am asking in some news stand, if they have comics for sale. Unfortunately, they have none. Where do the comics go? or Where can I find the Filipino-made comics aside from the Internet?

Looking at the bright side of things, at least she didn’t write her letter in txtspeak. I’ve already received two or three emails that have said: HELO! NID HELP 4 MY THESIS! PLS ANSWR ASAP. TNX! :-) COMIX RULEZ!

I appreciate the “comix rulez”… it’s flattering, but that’s not the point.

I find it sad that some of today’s students, senior college students at that, can’t even write grammatically correct sentences. Which makes me question, what are our grade school and high school teachers doing these days? What kind of education are the Filipino youth getting these days?

The latest issue of Newsweek features a cover story about how non-English speaking nations are making the supreme effort to learn the English language. “For lower-middle classes in India, English can mean a ticket to a prized call-center job…. Technology also plays a huge role in English’s global triumph: Eighty percent of the electronically stored information in the world is in English…”

What role does media play in all of this? I was part of that generation that grew up watching “Sesame Street”, American TV shows, and Japanese anime dubbed in English. I’m sure that played a major part of helping me learn and wield the English language.

What’s next for the Filipino youth? Where are they going? Are we giving them proper guidance? Are we using the right language when we give them instructions for the future?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Couple of weeks ago, Ms. Diyco featured another campaign made by the creatives here at Harrison Communications. Here's her review about the Neozep "Neozerye" TV campaign: Romancing the mighty colds cure ADS AND ENDS, Nanette A Franco-Diyco BUSINESS WORLD Vol. XX, No. 139, Friday-Saturday, February 9-10, 2007 http://www.bworldonline.com/Weekender020907/main.php?id=marketing_diyco The four television commercials that serialize the life of pretty housemaid Luwalhati, culminating in a storybook wedding to her once-upon-a-time señorito from the imposing mansion belong to an ad campaign awards class all its own. There have been other spoofs of soap operas selling other brand categories in the past. But for several reasons put together, the Neozep series of commercials that began with honest-to-goodness ad teasers that looked and sounded like teasers for true-blue soap operas proved ultra entertaining and more importantly, "reinforced Neozep’s leadership and further s...

Will you Play it Safe in 2025?

One of my favorite songs which I learned about early this year. Our boss at the agency played this at one of our town hall meetings. It's reminder to all creators that we will always be told to "stick to safe ideas" (which is fine, if you just want to get the work done and go home) but there will always be this other voice at the back of your head that will ask, "Maybe there's another way to do this? Maybe there's a better way to tell this story? Maybe you can tell if from a different point of view and make this old story feel like new? Maybe you can spend a few more minutes working on it? How about it? Let's give it a try? Another hour trying to re-write? Let's give it a go!" What I love about this song is how the lyrics take on the conservative point-of-view and how the visuals show us the exact opposite. One of my favorite bits of this song is this part, where the lyrics starts to give you a "list of commands", like it's a list o...
The Flag Bearer I have always found it curious that in Philippine pop culture, there has never been a popular flag-bearing character. In United States, the obvious example would be Captain America; followed by Wonder Woman (with her red, white, blue and star-spangled outfit) and of course, Superman (whose costume follows the color motif of the American flag). They became symbols for the American people during World War II. In the days after 9/11, more New Yorkers were seen wearing their Superman and Captain America t-shirts. If we take a look at other countries, they didn’t seem to see the need to create such a character. Even when Marvel created characters like The Guardian (a Canadian super-hero) and Union Jack (a British super-hero), they didn’t seem to develop a big enough following and have comic book titles that reached the 100th issue or spin-off to become a TV or cartoon show. Here in the Philippines, popular characters like Darna and Panday are not “flag bearers”. I guess, ...