Ang Alamat ni Apol

When anunassuming young man handed me his self-published collection of comic strips at a recent promotional event, I didn’t realize I was receiving what would become my favorite Filipino graphic novel of the year.

I’d never met Apol Sta. Maria before, but I’d heard OF him. That month, he was guest illustrator of our issue of Uno magazine, which is why we were both at the event.

The book, Ang Alamat ng Panget & Many Other, was anything but ostentatious. Black and white cover and interiors, black simple lines on white paper. It almost felt like a coloring book waiting for an enthusiastic child to fill it in.

When I finally cracked the book open one lazy Sunday afternoon, I was treated to Apol’s unique sense of humor: ribald, absurd, but very Filipino. More than once my girlfriend looked in on me, concerned, because I kept laughing out loud at odd intervals.

The book collects a series of strips Sta. Maria made while spending two bored years in Vietnam. Working in the advertising industry (where he still remains), he found he had very little of interest to do with his free time, and to keep from going insane, started drawing comics again.

There are no recurring characters, just a series of people that one might charitably call vessels for punch lines. But not every strip is set up in punch line format or joke, either. Some trade on hilarious juxtaposition, say, or a visual gag, or formalist play wherein Sta. Maria will actually subvert the conventions of comics, from paneling to differing degrees of detail in the same panel.

It’s this formalist play that I must confess I was most impressed with. You don’t see it very often, and almost never in local comics. In the excerpted strip “Plorma,” for example, a character reaches into his word balloon, grabs the letter L, and uses it as a gun. It only works because the strip is so simply drawn that in its “reality,” a simple L-shape can pass for a gun. It’s the most basic shape associated with the weapon, one we make with our forefinger and thumb when we want to make a shooting gesture.

In another strip, a new character appears mid-sequence, interrupting the story in progress and announces to the reader that this story sucks and we should move on to the next page. The rest of the page is blank, as if the creator (Sta. Maria) really did abandon it. But we’ll never know if it’s true, or was perfectly composed as a failure.

In yet another strip, an agent “Terror” has the T fall off his name, and thus he becomes agent “Error” and can do nothing right, a marked difference from before, when everyone was afraid of him and he was a badass.

It’s refreshing to see, such disparate self-contained strips that are connected not through characters or locale but the persistence of vision and humor of its creator.

His drawing style is intentionally crude: basic outlines and very little detail. This makes for a faster reading experience. People become even more expressive, as such. Once you can “read” the expression, that’s all you really need to get the joke. He even pokes fun at himself in one gag where a more fully rendered character appears and is treated as an abomination by the rest of the minimally detailed people. It also proves he can draw.

Underneath all the slapdash hijinks is a sharp social satirist.

One strip makes excellent use of the annoying “txtspeak,” where the text in a character’s word balloon itself is in the form of that unfortunate syntax. Another strip shrewdly puts a spin on our obsession with celebrity and appearing on TV, as a grandmother gives her grandchild a surefire strategy for appearing on TV—abandoning him in the middle of a crowded city and repeating the phrase “Eye to Eye” to kind strangers.

Of course, she is informed later by her daughter, the child’s mother, that “Eye to Eye” has been off the air for years.

It’s a book that is chock-full of invention, and has tremendous repeat reading value. It’s also a book that has been a big hit with friends, who more often than not get their own copy.

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Apol Sta. Maria’s Ang Alamat ng Panget & Many Other can be found at Sputnik in Cubao Expo. Tel. No. 7091867 or email sputnik.fantastik@gmail.com

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Ramon De Veyra blogs at http://www.thesecuriousdays.com