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HAPPY BDAY KAJO!!!


Just wanted to greet my partner-in-crime and in the dark arts Ka-jo Baldisimo a happy new year. (That's not really Kajo's pic up there, but that was his initial design for Trese.)

Considering it's his birthday today, I promise not to bug him about the lettered pages of TRESE #5. (Hopefully, he won't remember that I'm also late in submitting the script of TRESE #6)

It was almost a year ago when Kajo texted me, asking if I'd want to do a monthly, 20-page comic book. He said, if I could write it, he'd devote an hour a day to make one page. (At that time, I thought it would impossible to do considering the workload we both faced everyday.)

So, we did a little test.

I went away from my desk, away from the AEs that were bugging me to finish some print ad, and wrote down a little fight scene. I emailed it to Kajo, who emailed me back after an hour or so. And this is what I received:



Yup, originally, Trese was supposed to be a man, a cop named Anton Trese who carried around a "butot pagi" (the tail of a stingray), which supposedly is an effective weapon against aswang. In this page, Trese fights the aswang Mama San.

So, I texted him back and said okay to our little monthly experiment.

In the course of writing the script, I thought that if we made Trese a guy, he'd might get compared to John Constantine. So, we made Trese a woman (and she ended up getting compared to Selene from the movie UNDERWORLD and to two manga characters). Bummer.

Anyway, here's Kajo's initial Alexandra Trese sketch:



So, here we are... about to finish #5 and about to start on #6.
I guess you can say out little experiment is going quite well.

Happy birthday Kajo! Many thanks for your monthly reminders and for getting me to write again.

And here's a sneak peek to our very delayed TRESE #5:

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