The DNA of Pinoy komiks

JOSE Rizal was fixated with the Asian story “The Monkey and the Turtle,” which is about how a small turtle outsmarted a big monkey. In fact, he wrote an academic paper in English titled “Two Eastern Fables” on the Japanese and Filipino versions of the story that was published in July 1889 in Truebner’s Record in London. He previously drew 35 sketches of it with Spanish text in the scrapbook of Juan Luna’s wife in 1885. With other illustrated stories such as “The Baptism of R. Pfeiffer at Holy Cross Steinach” and “The Cure of the Bewitched,” Rizal is now widely recognized as the Father of Filipino komiks.

I gave an interview last Thursday night to Jerald Dorado during his Facebook live in the The Powerful Komiksman Podcast page. I said Rizal’s komiks were not published until years after he died; so, the seeds of Philippine comics were planted in the consciousness of the Filipinos much later during the American occupation. Given a certain level of freedom of speech, Filipinos then were inspired by American satirical political cartoons, which criticized the powerful and created them in the pages of Lipang Kalabaw. (Although it has to be noted that there were already satirical magazines in Spanish such as Thé Kon Leche, inspired by té con leche [tea and milk], but it did not spread widely among Filipinos.)