Joe Mari Chan: Can we just stop and read comics for a while?

MANILA, Philippines - If you ask award-winning recording  artist and composer Joe Mari Chan  what is the worth of his comic book collection, he’ll shrug his shoulders for sure. To be honest, he couldn’t care less.

“I’ve never bought comics to resell,” said Chan who keeps his prized possessions in drawers in the family’s rest house.

“What is the value of my collection?” he wondered wistfully. “It’s priceless to me. Every chance I get, I still read two or three comic books in a sitting. When my five grandchildren are with me, I read with them and do sound effects, too. I will never forget sharing my comics with my five kids when they were growing up.”

There is a simple reason why collectors like Chan collect.

“It gives me a lot of joy,” said Chan. “My comics collection captures and freezes my childhood. But eventually, we realize that our attachment to material things leads to dust. What is meaningful to us may not be so to the next generation. Even songs that were quite popular in the ‘50s will just fade and be forgotten once that generation passes. Life is a constant change and nothing stays the same. But while my comics give me joy and pleasure, I’ll keep them. Because in life, one has to strive to be happy.”

Chan, 64, recalled collecting his first few comic books when he was a kid in Iloilo .

“My grandmother used to give me money to buy comics — if my grades were good,” he said. “The comics sold for something like one peso then. I could only afford to buy one at a time so I didn’t have a big collection. There was no TV so radio, the movies and comics provided our entertainment. Radio brought us the popular songs of the day, the movies took us to faraway places and exciting adventure and comics helped to widen our vocabulary and exposed us to literature.”

Chan said the comics he liked were the Classics Illustrated series.

“As a young boy, I couldn’t afford to buy all the Classics Illustrated titles,” he continued. “I probably only had 10 or a dozen titles at most. While living in New York between 1975 and 1986, I found that there were stores selling secondhand comics so I started my collection.”

Chan said the comics were a springboard for his children and grandchildren to read the classics in book form.

When he returned to Manila from New York, Chan became acquainted with show business writer Franklin Cabaluna who had a collection of 30 to 40 Classics Illustrated titles. Chan, of course, had no hesitation to accept Cabaluna’s collection when the writer offered to give it away.

Today, Chan has 169 issues of Classics Illustrated, 80 issues of Classics Illustrated Junior, about 20 issues of Classics Specials (with titles like World War II and Adventures of Science), about 20 issues of DC comics, some 10 issues of photo-cover movie tie-ins and three hard-to-find issues of Mars Ravelo’s Darna series of the ‘50s.

Easily the jewel in Chan’s collection is a rare 1943 edition of Classics Illustrated’s No. 1 issue — The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas with a face value of 10 cents. A mint copy of this edition has a current street price of $2,400. Other valued treasures are a 1944 edition of Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horseman by Washington Irving and a 1949 issue of Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Chan doesn’t remember how much he paid for all his comics over the years although one Classics Illustrated copy of Knights of the Round Table in his pile had a price tag of $20. His latest purchase was in 1997, a digest-size reproduction of the Classics Illustrated version of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

Although vintage comics from various eras are readily available for sale via the Internet, Chan said he’s content with his collection and he’s not entertaining offers from buyers. A seller recently offered a complete collection of Classics Illustrated titles for $21,000 on the Net.

Chan said he admires how the “old-time” comic book artists took pains to inject reality and detail in their images. A favorite artist is Hal Foster who sketched the Prince Valiant comic series. Another is Filipino illustrator Francisco Coching who actually studied the human anatomy to precisely execute his sketches of people. Coching’s book Komiks: Katha at Guhit has a special place in Chan’s library.

Chan said he prefers the artists of yesteryear over today’s graphic novel illustrators who use a lot of “anime” effects in their drawings.

Asked to pick his favorite titles, Chan randomly plucked from his stack of comics such masterpieces as The Last of the Mohicans by James Fennimore Cooper, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Man Without a Country by Edward Everett Hale, The Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling, The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, Talisman by Sir Walter Scott, William Tell by Frederick Schiller, Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson, Macbeth by William Shakespeare and Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Chan said he likes the adventure stories of Ivanhoe, Rob Roy and Robin Hood from the medieval times more than the frontier and Western tales of Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill; but he’s collected them all just the same.

The Classics Illustrated Junior titles he now reads to his grandchildren include Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Enchanted Fish, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty.

After reading a comic book to his children or grandchildren, Chan said he dutifully writes down the date to record it for posterity. During the interview for this feature, he opened Goldilocks and the Three Bears to its inside cover page and there was this inscription, in his writing: “Feb. 25, 1987, read to Franco Chan.” Today, Chan’s son Franco is 27.

The photo-cover movie tie-ins in his collection include Zulu with Michael Caine, Tonka with Sal Mineo, Helen of Troy with Jacques Sernas and Rosanna Podesta, Old Yeller with Fess Parker and Johnny Shiloh with Kevin Corcoran. His DC titles include a few issues of Blackhawk and Superman.

Chan’s son Jose Antonio is also a collector with a room-full of toys from the Star Wars movie series and several comics of the Batman and X-Men genres.

Aside from comics, Chan has a collection of cast-iron miniature figures (including knights on horseback in jousting position, Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn, Zorro, the Alamo fortress and a Civil War battle scene) and over 5,000 LPs, 45s and 78s.

“Another hobby I’ve acquired is collecting old records and old movies that I knew growing up,” he went on. “In the ‘70s, this was a tedious hobby, having to look for those records in flea markets and specialty stores and waiting for the old films to be shown on TV. I would videotape them on U-Matic and later, on Betamax. Now, modern technology has made it easier for collectors with the release of CDs and DVDs. All you need now is money. In fact, downloading has made the search for old songs a one-two-three job.”

Chan said to a certain extent, modern technology has devalued “ancient” vinyl record collections. “In the ‘70s, a mint copy of a Sinatra LP would fetch a hundred dollars, sometimes more,” he noted. “Now, a CD of the same LP you can buy for P200.”

While Chan said collections of material things will eventually disintegrate, what will survive the test of time is the knowledge one learns in school and from books (including comics), the wisdom one learns from other people and the values one learns from parents and passes on to his or her children and their children.

Chan, a Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Philippines awardee in 1974, said even as he has bought plastic sheets and white cardboard backing for each of his comic books for protection, he knows that, in time, his collection will turn to dust. He is not enslaved by his collection and doesn’t go to the extent of storing the comics in a special room where the temperature is regulated to preserve the pages of over 60-year-old copies.

Chan’s simple goal in collecting comics is enjoyment — something that he passionately shares with his family and friends or anyone even remotely interested in his treasures. He’ll bequeath the collection to his children and grandchildren for them to enjoy as much as he has and still does.

When Chan isn’t busy attending to his sugar mill in Bacolod or trading commodities in his Makati office or singing in concerts or composing best sellers, he looks forward to weekends in the family rest house with wife Mary Ann and their children and grandchildren — for the chance to read and reread his comics.