A comic book connoisseur

There’s this beautiful vignette in the Pulitzer-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay where the writer Michael Chabon tells how his protagonist fell in love with comic books: "(Joe Kavalier) would remember for the rest of his life a peaceful half hour spent reading a copy of Betty and Veronica that he had found in a service station rest room: Lying down with it under a fir tree, in a sun-slanting forest outside of Medford, Oregon, wholly absorbed into that primary-colored world of bad gags, heavy ink lines, Shakespearean farce, and the deep, almost Oriental mystery of the two big-toothed, wasp-waisted goddess-girls, light and dark, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship." Wow! Archie Comics never sounded so divine.

Anyway, lucky for Joe Kavalier that he lived in post-war ‘40s when life experiences were purer than they are now in the Information Age. Lucky for him that he still has a clear memory of the moment he lost his proverbial comic book virginity. I, on the other hand, who was born in 1982, a year of a decade that had Spider-Man briefs available in Rustan’s and had Super Friends on GMA-7, will never have that idyllic afternoon under a fir-tree, powdery comic book in hand and eyes awash in primitive Ben-Day dots. By the time I was born, comic books were already a big part of the pop culture landscape, making a strong presence in movies, TV, video games, toys, and merchandise. Reading a comic book and getting lost in the great mythologies these frozen movies offered never felt as magical as a first time.

But trying to find that eureka moment wouldn’t hurt. Even if I didn’t have one, I have a 23-year-old media-saturated existence to comb out. Do you remember that scene in the movie High Fidelity where John Cusack’s character was rearranging his vinyl collection autobiographically, to remember how one great album led to the appreciation of another? Well, the following will be slightly similar to that, but in comic book terms, of course. So here goes…

I remember nursing a bowl of Royco alphabet soup in 1986 as I gingerly watched a crude Panday cartoon show on RPN-9. I remember the way it was colored in flat reds, greens and yellows, the way it changed frames or show a slight trace of movement every five minutes, the way the cartoon hero was impeccably rendered to resemble the late Fernando Poe Jr. Looking at it in retrospect, I can’t help but laugh at how I was so naïve at that time, enthralled by low-tech animation, but somehow, something about it made me proud that there was a Pinoy superhero out there.

I remember in the ‘80s that it was an unspoken rule among kids that you had to choose one character from a certain TV show or comic book universe and be the embodiment of that character. It was not a matter of being asked, "Who’s your favorite character in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?"; you were asked, "Sino ka sa Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?" as if that character was your incarnation in a past life, your spirit animal, your totem. It was often the case that everybody wanted to be the leader or the most handsome guy of the team, and that your physically weak, effeminate classmate lived under the insufferable torment of being Pink Five all the time. Okay, so I was Donatello, Ray Stantz, Bumblebee, Tunnel Rat, Hans Solo, Steve Armstrong, and Lion-O through the years, but when the day came when I was going to choose which character I was in the Marvel Universe, I had to rifle through decks and decks of Marvel trading cards, comparing powers, vital statistics and story arcs. At the end of the day, I chose to be Spider-Man.

I remember watching Tim Burton’s Batman in a beautiful theater in Ali Mall in 1989 with my dad and my brothers. I remember enjoying every single dark second of it, but what kept my heart racing were the sounds of the movie. The hiss of a piton gun. The sound of a Batarang biting into concrete. The metal-on-metal clunk and the robotic hum of the Batmobile as it shielded itself upon Batman’s beck and call. After that movie, the onomatopoeic graphics in the comic books I owned, every ZAP!, BAMF!, and SNIKT!, were never the same again.

I remember going on a field trip to Laguna and reading a graphic novel called Batman: A Death in the Family with five other classmates on the bus ride home. No, we didn’t pass the book around after one was finished reading it. One of us was holding the book aspread, and the others were either squeezing against each other or peering through the backrest to read along. Before the one holding the book could turn the page, he asked everyone first if they were ready. We were like Nazi camp refugees fighting over a looted piece of pornography. When we came to the chapter where the Joker was pummeling Robin to death with a crowbar, one of us balled his hands into fists and started cursing like a sailor. Surprised with his reaction, we turn to him and ask, "O, bakit?" Frothing at the mouth, he says, "I wanna kill Joker." Never seen a more visceral reaction in my life than that.

I remember seeing DC Comics’ office building the first time I went to New York. I was walking on the street when I saw through a glass panel the building’s observation elevator go up and reveal a full-colored statue of Superman carrying the glass capsule on his shoulders. I saw the Man of Steel carrying an elevator full of people up to the Manhattan skyline! It threw me back to the ‘30s and made me feel a fast-talking, cigar-chomping journalist who wrote about vigilantes.

I remember my first purchase of a comic book in America. It happened in Universal Studio’s City Walk at a heavenly store called Things From Another World. The clerk handed the comic book to me in a brown paper bag. It felt warm to the touch. The clerk then told me, "Don’t open it until after ten minutes. The guys at DC just delivered it; you might smear the ink." There’s a thing that writer Kevin Smith calls a comic book orgasm. I believe I just had one that day.

I remember writing this article.

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