Valentine's Day in Manila, with comic books

Valentines Day in the Philippines, sick and miserable and alone. 

So I went to the comic shop.  ("The smell of the comic shop makes everything better."  So true.)

Yah, there's a comic shop in the mall across the street.  Understand, I'm in Makati.  The business district part of Makati, not the part where guys pop out of side alleys to offer you Cialis.  This is where the top 2% of Filipino society live, the pointy end of the Gini curve.  So, though I'm in a country where millions of people try to survive on $2 a day or less, I can walk out of my hotel door and straight into a Starbucks, a Haagen-Dazs shop, or Tony Roma's... all charging American-level prices, or even a bit more.

But, on the other hand, a comic book shop.  Pretty much exactly the same as one in the states, right down to a discount bin filled with three decades of bad comics.  Mike Grell's Starslayer, ancient issues of Concrete, Justice League Elite, Mai the Psychic Girl...  And the action figures posing on their shelves; and the high-price back issues displayed on top of the shelves; and of course the new comics lined up neatly on the shelves: Grant Morrison's Final Crisis, and the new version of Top Ten, and all the X-titles down in the lower right hand corner where they always are.

While I found some stuff to buy -- some, not a lot; I have to carry everything back, after all, and I'm not paying excess baggage -- there were no discounts except for the ones in the bin; the shop charges US prices or a bit more.  Which puts it out of reach of most folks around here.  I got the first three issues of the new Umbrella Academy series, but at 150 pesos or a bit over three bucks an issue it's just not going to get wide distribution in this country.

And yet I'd always thought that Filipinos were big comics readers.  After all, they've produced a surprising number of good writers and artists for the American market.  They must be reading comics somehow, right?

And they are!  There are comic books on every newsstand.  They're in a format I hadn't seen before: digest-plus size -- smaller than a proper "floppy" comic, a bit bigger than a Readers Digest -- each issue collecting two or three issues.  They have local Filipino ads at front and back, but no internal ones -- which actually makes them easier to read.  And each issue costs just P95, or just about two bucks. 

Three floppies for two bucks!  That's a good deal.  Could this model possibly be transplanted?  (Yeah, I know.  Clutching at straws.)

So far I've seen three titles: DC, "DC Kids", and Marvel.  A typical Marvel has some combination of Iron Man, Spider Man, one of the X-Titles, and Marvel Adventures.  The DC Kids are kid-friendly, which is great.  The Marvels I'm buying mostly for the Marvel Adventures, which range from okay through good to awesome.  (The one with Hercules, where they have to babysit Cerebus and Orthus?  Awesome.)

One drawback: they're sort of randomly commingled.  Which means that a fun, kid-friendly Marvel Adventures story may be in the same book with an issue of the awful "One Day More" storyline from Spider Man and one of those nasty Warren Ellis stories that has Iron Man ripping someone's head off.  So, I won't be able to just hand these over to the boys. 

Still, it's pretty cool to be able to just buy a bunch of comics.

Oh, and: the discount bin also contained several of the 1989 reprints of the first 50 issues of Cerebus the Aardvark.  That's early, funny Cerebus, with much of the brilliance and hardly any of the insanity.  I collected these issues when they first came out in the early 1980s -- I was in college -- and read them over and over, laughing like mad.

Anyway.  I bought some comics and took them back to my hotel room and, you know, read them.  And then I had some bad Indian food and typed up the last couple of days of interview notes and started outlining my report.  And when that palled and I found myself getting a little blue, I read some more comic books.

And that was my Valentine's Day in Manila.

Comments

[James Bodi]

Does Comic Book Guy have a Manila counterpart? If so, what's he like?

[Doug M.]

If he does, I haven't seen him yet. Staff at the shop were three female, one male. (Which, come to think of it, is not like the US model at all.)

Also, bearded Filipinos are rare, and fat ones even rarer. So if Cat Piss Man is here (and he may well be), I suspect he's expressing a different phenotype.

Doug M.

[James Bodi]

Yeah, I figured the look would be quite different, maybe faux-gangsta or faux-hipster.

[Doug (not Muir)]

So when did you quit with Cerebus?

[Bernard Guerrero]

"Yeah, I figured the look would be quite different"

Why?

[James Bodi]

Good question, Bernard. A guess based on Filipinos I'd seen / known in Canada and Bermuda? Also, seems to me that CBG is a north-american stereotype. But I could be totally wrong on that.