it being the weekend, i have to work with a 28.8k dial-up, so i really don't want to spend too much time here, so just a quick update.
Mabel and i just came from the Unmasking where, despite all logic, we actually had a grand time. details later.
for now, i just want to let it be known that, yes, my three picks for the prose category did make it to the top three, and The God Equation swept-up both the main award and the People's choice. Dusk and Hika Girl made it to the top three of the comics category, and though i didn't pick it for a winner, i'm immensely glad Splat made it up there as well.
A Strange Map of Time, to my chagrin, shares the top spot with Equation. but more on that and other miffs when i get back on our office broadband.
most importantly for this post, i got to meet all three prose winners (the only truly legitimate ones in that category, to my mind), Ma. Michaela "Mikey" Atienza who wrote the utterly wonderful Atha, Philbert Dy who did the delightful The Great Philippine Space Mission, and Michael Co, with his awe-inspiring, utterly ego-crushing The God Equation.
the offshoot of which is i've asked each of them to comment on the reviews i'd written of their stories (pretty please?), so watch out for their digs in the relevant spaces. (incidentally for those writers, it would be great if you maybe left blog urls, if you have them, for linking? and keep checking for responses to your posts. it might get interesting here.)
i was too ashamed of my pitiful attempts at comics criticism to ask the comics category winners to comment on the reviews i'd written of their work, so i didn't. it would be great, however, if they somehow got wind of this and went ahead and got on-board the comments sections anyway. hint, hint.
congratulations to all the winners. and, yes, i really mean it. my teeth are nowhere near forming a sieve for my words. as Mr Gaiman said about Ms Clarke's Stopp't Clock Yard, i really wish i'd written those stories, but i'm even more pleased i'd gotten to read them. or something like that.
30 comments:
can you unmask all the writers? haha. especially the one who wrote Dusk and A Strange Map oif Time.
Did Manix Abrera really write Splat? Because it looks like he did
Dusk was written by Rommel something... sorry, i forgot. A Strange Map of Time was written by Ian Casocot.
and yes, Manix Abrera wrote Splat. he told us Kiko Machine may be coming out with a second volume later this year.
Sheesh, only winners can leave comments? How discriminating. How about us losers?
-'Karnabal'
actually, if you'll read carefully through the comments, i did say all writers who happen to drop by are welcome here. guess i should've made that clear on the main post.
hey benjor. honored you could drop by. next time you post a comment, how bout you drop a link for me to, er, link?
'sides, you already spoke up, so how bout you tell me how sorry an excuse for a review i came up with for your piece?
Hello,
I'm just happy that someone took the time to download and read my entry considering they put up a 28 MB(!) PDF of my comic (DRINKING BUDDIES FROM HELL). Anyway thanks for the review. The winners are still basking in the glow and we losers have time to post stuff on blogs :-P
Seriously, it's nice to see the diversity in the art in the finalists. If anything it shows that there are a lot of people out there taking their art influences from all sorts of places, not just superhero comics and manga. I especially liked DUSK's and DEFIANT's art, and KARNABAL's story (if the art had looked less photo-based it would've been great -- sorry ben, whoever you are).
haha. welcome to the blog! in these words, may you find your own zen in darkness. i just made that up right now.
to be honest, i was intimidated by what looked like rather busy art and all the words words words of your comic and was reluctant to read it at first. but, as it turns out, i really enjoyed it.
the hellblazer ish i was comparing "drinking buddies" to was published in the TPB collection Original Sins and i think may have been illustrated by hizonnah Mr Alcala himself. fyi
feel free to look around and drop comments wherever you feel like it.
Hehe I suppose in the general view of life, we're all losers. (Well, I also contributed so...) ;-)
I know you mentioned the winners but I'm unclear with your post: so The God Equation tied with A Strange Map of Time for the top place in writing?
In any case, yeah, everyone who contributed should write in/ comment in. It would be nice to link up with all writers of speculative fiction as well as comic book creators. Wouldn't that be fun?
yup. A Strange Map tied with The God Equation. which is utter bullshit imho. pardon my english.
shit talaga, I kind liked Ian's but The God Equation deserved the top spot.
After I read it I still wanted to read stuff like that, like Neal Stephenson's or erm...Philip K. Dick.
Yeah, it was pure SF. That's how I like my stories.
if you're into The God Equation specifically, you might like George Alec Effinger's Marid novels. Alastair Reynolds' also has a bit of a noirish feel, and is very hard sf.
not a problem, robby. i wanted to do something different, cos i know most will do dave mckean-ish art or comic book or anime art (i guess my style still came out as dave mckean-ish according to dink, but oh well...maybe as long as its dark and rendered it's a dave mckean). it's nice to see us gather in blogs, i'm sorry it had to be yours that was cluttered, dink :P oh, and it's my first attempt on comics, really. If you don't discount my grade school 'justice force' and 'care bear massacre' comics.
dark and rendered makes it a dave mckean? oh, i wouldn't say that. actually, in retrospect, you're right, it isn't quite as Mckeanish as i made it out to appear. i think it was the combination of subject matter and treatment that made me think automatically of Mckean.
though it still harkens a bit to his Arkham Asylum art, though i suppose a closer comparison might be a monochrome John Bolton in Mystery Play mode.
on second thought, still not there.
ah well, i always said i suck at comics reviews. i like the medium but i am no expert, not by a longshot.
hang on, except for the lack of multimedia, your art does remind me of McKean in his more chiaroscuric/realist moments in Signal to Noise.
haha, that's okay, dink. just to be mentioned with (or compared to) mckean and bolton (although far from their work) is a huge compliment. as for my comment on what you said about my work: although it wasn't part of your list, i appreciate that you liked the comic's story and art. i tried to create the carnival setting in the philippines (which i thought was unique in itself), but i guess it still ended up having a typically western feel. i was supposed to focus more on the fil-am aspect of the story but it didn't turn out as significantly as i wanted. oh well, with the time and page constraints it was the best i could do. don't think it turned out awful for a first try.
(side note: i created the materials for the neil gaiman event last year. got to have dinner with him as my compensation.)
YOU LIE!!!!!
damn you, ben.
hehe.
actually, i think you did very well in conveying the carnival atmosphere in the Philippines. certainly there were western elements, but then, so do the actual carnivals hereabouts, since the perya itself isn't quite Filipino to begiin with.
what did you think about the event itself? i have my own thoughts (i'm not sure it's fit to be blogged) although i expected much more from the production, the attendance and the judges. i did have to leave halfway because of an emergency; i would have liked to have met everyone else.
well, the judges weren't there, everybody left as soon as they knew they'd either gotten an award or weren't up for one, there was just Pinikpikan and Planet Zip for entertainment and while they were cool, you can't expect to be enthralled by them all night...
still, i had a lot of fun, inspite of being what looked to be the only loser with no friends among the shortlisters to have the gall to stick around through the whole thing
the displays were downright hilarious. poor phil dy's display looked like a science project; he deserved more than that. and there was a people's choice category yet not all entries were on display. when i found out neil wasn't a judge i was quite disheartened. i know arnold arre and jaime daez were the two judges for the comics, who was the third one? wasn't able to finish the awards.
yeah, the displays did suck blue cheese.
i'm afraid i don't remember who the third judge was.
hey, look on the bright side... (great, now that song is playing in my head again)... even though Neil wasn't a judge, the fact that you were on the shortlist means he got to read your stuff, which is more than i can say for us losers.
true. actually, we'll never know. maybe he just read the winners. have you posted or are you ever going to post your story? sorry, haven't dug through your blog. but honestly i like the way you write your online commentary. i love the sarcasm. and honesty, i guess.
speaking of honesty, i just held back from posting a rather scathing commentary on the results of the awards...
yup, i can be chicken, too. i don't want to ruin my career before it's even started.
no, i haven't posted it, but i'm pretty free with letting people read it. if you really want to, just let me know your e-mail ad and i'll send you an attachment.
Hi, skinny,
I'm of the opposite camp -- it's a matter of taste I guess. Usually I feel shortchanged if I buy a comic book which isn't wordy (or at least packed with things happening). Though that's not to say the dialogue in DRINKING couldn't have been improved -- I'm really not a writer, though I know a good story when I see one. My frustration is that a lot of entries weren't even stories to start with... but that's the most I'll say.
Usually I'm a very vocal critic (ask Gerry Alanguilan) of film and the few comics that I read, but in this instance I'm quiet since it's bad form to have been a finalist and critic at the same time.
I'd like to hear what you held back on posting -- please email it to me (my email address is on my blogger profile).
Check out my blog, too (though I haven't updated in almost 2 months now!!!! Sorry people, haven't been feeling politicized lately).
Hi, Ben,
I went to the event too at around 7:15 then left by 7:30 because I had a meeting to attend (I make storyboards for a living). I was planning to go back but apparently they announced the winners early so there was nothing to return to. Geez, they didn't even bother to display my work (and I think two others), so I figured it was their way of telling me not to hang around anyway.
haha. you probably wouldn't have liked my entry, then. it isn't a conventional narrative, and you'd probably argue that it "isn't a story." but that's the artistic choice i made for my story, and, though it probably meant that it was doomed from the beginning, i stick to it.
Hi Robby,
i know, i was telling dink about it (via secret email correspondence as not to offend other people, haha) that if there was a category for people's choice, they ought to have displayed all the contestants. instead not all were exhibited--in my case few pages were missing, and the prose displays were really hilarious. i have my own unpublicized thoughts about the event, the contestants and the judges. let's have a private chat with dink, haha. by the way, i loved your artwork.
I was very disappointed with the displays. I think that for a contest that calls itself the 1st Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards, the stars of the show should have been the COMICS. Man, they were freakin' awesome! I was expecting huge panels with each of the shortlisted graphic entries displayed like a labyrinth ... and the screens should've had a running slideshow of each graphic story. IMHO, creating displays for the prose entries was completely unnecessary.
well, if it weren't for the sucky displays, i wouldn't have been able to identify Mikey at the event... even though i'd signed in at registration right after her.
at the very least, they let me have that moment of serendipity. so DID they served a purpose...
mike, i like your labyrinth idea though. i may be the only person who actually prefered the Fullybooked rockwell setup pre-renovation.
Which one, the bookshelves layout when they moved to the top floor? Yeah, I also liked the labyrinthe set up though as Charles said, it was pretty easy to get lost. But I figure if people can get used to navigating the huge expanse of the Mall of Asia, why not a simple lousy bookstore, right?
i can think of worse places to get lost in than a labyrinthine bookstore...
Greets to the webmaster of this wonderful site! Keep up the good work. Thanks.
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