now, were wuz i.... oh yeah. COMICON ! the i remember the first time i went. it was in the early eighties. me and a bud, marc williams, took an old clunker (was based in L.A. at that time) and headed down to the old place where they held it. man those were the days! seems to me that the comicon back then was more innocent (meaning it was for comics, by comic geeks). i was really blown over by how large the con has become. but that's another story.

flash forward. two years ago. got back into the con thing and equipt with a finished mini, i trucked down to the con. but as i said, i was just tripping on how LARGE every has become! and not only that, i had no contact was so ever. i had sent the mini to a pro back east that i really admired named rafael kayanan, and got back some kind encouragement from him. that sort of gave me a boost to actually show my stuff to other pros.

up and down i went through the halls of the convention center. that year was a lot hotter than i remembered san diego to be. i felt like the center's aircon was struggling to cool off the teeming hordes of humanity.

saw some cool artists and their wares. one thing i dig about the new layout: you can be up close and personal with the artist.

so while i was making the circuit, i was wracking my brain: who to show my stuff to. the artists that i admired were busy with signing and all, so my time was limited. not to mention that i was shaking in my boots. i was going thru this thought when i got to the begining of the artist alley and lo and behold, i saw i guy, whose work i always thought just rocks. it just so happened that there was a lull between crowds. and like the parting of the red sea, there was an opening. there he was in front of me. he was drawing/inking an old character named XO man o war.

it was whilce portacio.

after a lot of obstacles and barriers,
one of which is having to settle working with corel draw and a partial version at that, here it is.
the mini comic is 32 pages long and it sort of a compilation of some of the genres i have interest in (martial arts, war stories, manga, anime...). now all i had to do was find a publisher. and where would a neophyte go and find one? where else but comiccon!

ps:
to see the cover better, click on it. you'll get to another window. place the arrow cursor in the middle of the pix and it will show a small square with arrows inside of it on the lower right hand side. click on that. it will give you a great view of the cover.

ok, so the family went and left for america. i finally got access to the mother load of geekdom.
i got all the comics i could get a hold of, and during this time i honed my skills as best i can.
i wasn't really a school kind of guy, so what ever i learned artwise, i learned by doing and by just being plain stubborn

i've seen guys that are better than me growing up, but they never really had the passion for the artform as i do, cause now, NONE of them ever produced work. which is kind of sad. these guys had these super duper computers and have all these resources but none has produced anything we talked about when we were kids.

after high school, i got caught up in this thing they called LIFE and for a while allowed that to be as the excuse to not pursue my dream. nothing wrong with having a LIFE (y'know 9-5, kids, mortgage et al. or at least chasing after them) but there was something in me that just won't settle for that.

after a few years of doing grunt work in the graphics field, i got so fed up with doing someone elses work, that i finally got going onproducing a comic book. it was during this time i met a good bud from high school again.

we talked for a while about the days. but like many of my contemporaries, he has not produced anything. that sort of got me thinking: if not now, when? that was really the spark that set this whole thing up. more talk insued and the result was "let's get a studio together!" we met for a few weeks while i was doing my work, and we talked about how to go about this. but, like i said, the passion wasn't there. i had to move to san diego, but that in it self shouldn't have shut anything down. i emailed him a few times, but after a while, he stopped answering. too much work, i recon.

but i kept on. i worked on the project every where. coffee shops, book stores, parks, you name it.
nothing was going to keep me from the goal.

howdy all! after all this time, i finally up and went blogging! i wrote this to document this project i'm involved with. what is it? well, like all good stories, we need to start at the beginning.
i've always been nuts about comics. ever since i was a kid i've been facinated by these pictures with word that took me into lands that i never imagined existed. i started off reading the daily comics that was in the news paper back in the day. they reprinted those cool tarzan, the phantom, flash gordon adventure strips as a kid in the p. i.

i got so hooked that i started to do my own "comics". i got these butcher paper (we wuz poor. i didn't even gradute to typing paper til later!) and started to draw. i drew everything. but my favorite was making up all kinds of adventures of my heroes on those bacon fat stained paper complete with me vocalizing the dialogs and sounds effects (c'mon, you know you all did it too ; ) ).

i would go to the neighborhood palenke and rent these ratty copies of dc and marvel comics. i guess the lady who own the stall had some contact with someone at the US base, cause back then, it was kinda hard to find american comic books in my neck of the woods. i didn't care if some of the books were missing covers. i ate them up! she had the justice league of america, superman, the works! and with a tindahan that sells halo halo close by, it was nerd nirvana! i also devoured the local pinoy komiks stuff. i wish i still had those, cause they were awesome works from some masters of the artform. some of them actually did work for dc and marvel which just thrilled me no end!

later i got some fantastic four and daredevil from my father. it was the first time i actually saw some brand new american comics up close. kewl stuff. it was then i knew that i HAD to do this.
but how?

the answer came when it was announced that the family was moving to america.