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kamreadsandrecsManila isn't quite as safe as we're used to thinking. Anyone and everyone who lives in this city knows it. Then again, who am I to say that with certainty? The only places I go to after dark tend to be in the general vicinity of a mall, places which are well lit and highly populated. I've never ventured to the darker side-streets and haunts of this city I call home, places where getting mugged is the least of the things that could happen to someone who dares traverse those places - and that's if you're actually familiar with them.
And what haunts those places? What do the muggers, the rapists, the druggies fear? What makes the shivers course down their spines when they find themselves wandering alone in the dark? Not the cops, that's for sure.
But in the Trese comic series, written by Budjette Tan and drawn by Kajo Baldisimo, we find out just what roams the shadows of Manila's underbelly - and just who polices them.
I was introduced to the series by Dr. Shirley Lua, one of my colleagues/professors at La Salle, earlier this year. I found it sitting on her shelf in the faculty room, and asked if I could read them. After permission was granted, I settled down to reading the first four cases, collected in Trese: Murder on Balete Drive.
I was hopelessly, irrevocably hooked. Here was a Filipino comic series I could really, really get behind. Don't get me wrong: I love Zsazsa Zaturnnah, and cannot wait for the upcoming sequel, but Tan and Baldisimo's creation is something I enjoy on a deeply personal level. I love anything and everything that has to do with mythology and the supernatural (a romance stretching all the way back to when my age was a single-digit number), which is why I dove right into Hellboy without a second thought when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffeebased threw it my way. If I could get something like Hellboy, but set in the Philippines, I would quite possibly be the happiest reader on the face of the planet, so you can imagine my glee when I was introduced to Trese.
But to say that Trese is a Philippine-set Hellboy with a female protagonist would be terribly unfair to Tan and Baldisimo. It shares some similarities, sure, but then you could just as easily look at Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series or Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books and see that they all bear a striking similarity to Mignola's Hellboy. Trese, however, stands out not only because of its choice of milieu, but also because of its storytelling and its art.
Tan's storytelling is half of what makes Trese enjoyable and unique. Despite the use of English as a primary language, there is a certain cadence and pace to the storytelling that is distinctly unique to Tan, and distinctly Filipino. It's reminiscent of the pace and tone people use when they're telling scary stories, but it's not American or European: it's distinctly Pinoy, as if writing about tikbalang and the White Lady of Balete Drive requires a particular shade of shadow to the words, and anyone else other than a Pinoy will not get it just right.
Another thing that makes Tan's storytelling unique is that he draws upon not only Philippine folklore for his material, but also the rich mine of Manila's urban legends, using them to add more depth to the Manila Trese inhabits. Tan also has a gift for taking the familiar, such as the vendors in Manila's various markets, and making them just a bit different. Trese's Manila is familiar to the reader, but is in no way normal. And really, would we expect anything less?
It's a bit difficult to really explain the effect Tan's writing has on the reader, since it's only half of what makes Trese what it is. To really understand it, you'd have to see Baldisimo's visuals. Just like Tan's writing, it's easy to look at the art in Trese and think "Mignola" right off the bat. And while it's true there are shades of Mignola (hehe, "shades of Mignola"...get it? Bah, never mind.) in Baldisimo's art, there is something about the way Trese is drawn that makes me think of the grit of Manila getting on my skin. I study and work in a school located along Taft Avenue, which is one of the major thoroughfares of Manila, and also one of the dirtiest and most polluted, so I know what the grit of Manila feels like (not to mention the smell of Manila's smog...). Baldisimo's visuals give me that exact same feeling, but in a very, very good way.
Baldisimo accomplishes this to great effect by sticking strictly to black and white, with minimal use of any other effects. There are only shadows and light, mimicking the effect of Manila's streetlamps (where they actually exist and work) on people and objects. It is with this "light" that Baldisimo draws the people and places of Trese's Manila, and the result is a Manila that doesn't seem quite real, inhabited by people who are not quite what one thinks they are.
The collective effect of Tan's storytelling prowess and Baldisimo's fantastic art is Manila, in all her dark, dirty, mysterious glory (and I dare anyone to say the city isn't glorious in her own way), but with some sort of veil lifted, as if for the first time we are seeing things that were always there, but which we could not see - or chose not to see. Human beings are diurnal creatures, and we are all but blind at nighttime without the aid of electrical lights. We stick close to well-lit places, taking security in the brightness. But Trese shows us something else: a city inhabited by entities none of us would want to meet in a dark alleyway, but which seem part and parcel of the city, as if Manila would lose much of her character if such beings did not exist. Manila without the darkness is not Manila, and the darkness without those beings is not Manila's darkness.
So I say unto you, oh wonderful friendslist: get your copies now and read, read, read! A volume is not expensive - you can buy both volumes for the same price you would normally pay for the latest Marvel or DC comic. I got my copies from FullyBooked in MOA, but I've been told National Bookstore usually keeps a good stock.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to be getting back to Unreported Murders.
And what haunts those places? What do the muggers, the rapists, the druggies fear? What makes the shivers course down their spines when they find themselves wandering alone in the dark? Not the cops, that's for sure.
But in the Trese comic series, written by Budjette Tan and drawn by Kajo Baldisimo, we find out just what roams the shadows of Manila's underbelly - and just who polices them.
I was introduced to the series by Dr. Shirley Lua, one of my colleagues/professors at La Salle, earlier this year. I found it sitting on her shelf in the faculty room, and asked if I could read them. After permission was granted, I settled down to reading the first four cases, collected in Trese: Murder on Balete Drive.
I was hopelessly, irrevocably hooked. Here was a Filipino comic series I could really, really get behind. Don't get me wrong: I love Zsazsa Zaturnnah, and cannot wait for the upcoming sequel, but Tan and Baldisimo's creation is something I enjoy on a deeply personal level. I love anything and everything that has to do with mythology and the supernatural (a romance stretching all the way back to when my age was a single-digit number), which is why I dove right into Hellboy without a second thought when
coffeebased threw it my way. If I could get something like Hellboy, but set in the Philippines, I would quite possibly be the happiest reader on the face of the planet, so you can imagine my glee when I was introduced to Trese.But to say that Trese is a Philippine-set Hellboy with a female protagonist would be terribly unfair to Tan and Baldisimo. It shares some similarities, sure, but then you could just as easily look at Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series or Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books and see that they all bear a striking similarity to Mignola's Hellboy. Trese, however, stands out not only because of its choice of milieu, but also because of its storytelling and its art.
Tan's storytelling is half of what makes Trese enjoyable and unique. Despite the use of English as a primary language, there is a certain cadence and pace to the storytelling that is distinctly unique to Tan, and distinctly Filipino. It's reminiscent of the pace and tone people use when they're telling scary stories, but it's not American or European: it's distinctly Pinoy, as if writing about tikbalang and the White Lady of Balete Drive requires a particular shade of shadow to the words, and anyone else other than a Pinoy will not get it just right.
Another thing that makes Tan's storytelling unique is that he draws upon not only Philippine folklore for his material, but also the rich mine of Manila's urban legends, using them to add more depth to the Manila Trese inhabits. Tan also has a gift for taking the familiar, such as the vendors in Manila's various markets, and making them just a bit different. Trese's Manila is familiar to the reader, but is in no way normal. And really, would we expect anything less?
It's a bit difficult to really explain the effect Tan's writing has on the reader, since it's only half of what makes Trese what it is. To really understand it, you'd have to see Baldisimo's visuals. Just like Tan's writing, it's easy to look at the art in Trese and think "Mignola" right off the bat. And while it's true there are shades of Mignola (hehe, "shades of Mignola"...get it? Bah, never mind.) in Baldisimo's art, there is something about the way Trese is drawn that makes me think of the grit of Manila getting on my skin. I study and work in a school located along Taft Avenue, which is one of the major thoroughfares of Manila, and also one of the dirtiest and most polluted, so I know what the grit of Manila feels like (not to mention the smell of Manila's smog...). Baldisimo's visuals give me that exact same feeling, but in a very, very good way.
Baldisimo accomplishes this to great effect by sticking strictly to black and white, with minimal use of any other effects. There are only shadows and light, mimicking the effect of Manila's streetlamps (where they actually exist and work) on people and objects. It is with this "light" that Baldisimo draws the people and places of Trese's Manila, and the result is a Manila that doesn't seem quite real, inhabited by people who are not quite what one thinks they are.
The collective effect of Tan's storytelling prowess and Baldisimo's fantastic art is Manila, in all her dark, dirty, mysterious glory (and I dare anyone to say the city isn't glorious in her own way), but with some sort of veil lifted, as if for the first time we are seeing things that were always there, but which we could not see - or chose not to see. Human beings are diurnal creatures, and we are all but blind at nighttime without the aid of electrical lights. We stick close to well-lit places, taking security in the brightness. But Trese shows us something else: a city inhabited by entities none of us would want to meet in a dark alleyway, but which seem part and parcel of the city, as if Manila would lose much of her character if such beings did not exist. Manila without the darkness is not Manila, and the darkness without those beings is not Manila's darkness.
So I say unto you, oh wonderful friendslist: get your copies now and read, read, read! A volume is not expensive - you can buy both volumes for the same price you would normally pay for the latest Marvel or DC comic. I got my copies from FullyBooked in MOA, but I've been told National Bookstore usually keeps a good stock.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to be getting back to Unreported Murders.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-14 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 04:26 am (UTC)^^;
no subject
Date: 2009-07-14 03:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 04:34 am (UTC)Case 1: At the Intersection of Balete and 13th Street (http://tresekomix.blogspot.com/2006/01/read-complete-trese-1.html)
Case 2: Rules of the Race (http://tresekomix.blogspot.com/2006/06/trese-2-complete-issue.html)
Case 3: Our Secret Constellation (http://tresekomix.blogspot.com/2006/04/our-secret-constellation-complete.html)
Case 4: The Tragic Case of Dr. Burgos (http://tresekomix.blogspot.com/2006/04/trese-4-complete-story.html)
Case 5: A Little Known Murder in Studio 4 (http://tresekomix.blogspot.com/2006/06/trese-5-complete-issue.html)
Case 6: The Outpost on Kalayaan Avenue (http://tresekomix.blogspot.com/2006/10/trese-6-complete-issue.html)
Case 7: Embrace of the Unwanted (http://tresekomix.blogspot.com/2007/09/trese-7-embrace-of-unwanted.html)
Case 8, only has preview pages up, so I'm not linking that one for the meantime. If Tan and Baldisimo choose to put up the rest of it, I'll inform you ASAP.
In the meantime, I'll try to contact Tan. I have him on Twitter, so I'll see if I can ask him how to purchase copies of Trese abroad.
OMG
Date: 2009-07-15 04:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 11:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 12:30 pm (UTC)http://nationalbookstore.com/shop/products.asp?merchant_code=NBS&categ=95&product=19157
And check out that price! Unbeatable!
XD
no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-14 10:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 04:52 am (UTC)>>; But maybe after the 25th because I have no more moooooooooney. ;; *WEEPS*
...or... or maybe tomorrow, since I'll be at Megamall anyway and they'll probably have it at NBS. asdlfkjhsdfkjh I hate being poor. ><;
no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 06:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-15 12:29 pm (UTC)XD