Available now in National Bookstore branches all over.
Last Saturday, I attended the fourth Philippine Komiks Convention or Komikon 2008. As usual, this annual event was held at the Bahay ng Alumni at the University of the Philippines in Diliman (and as far as I'm concerned, that's where it should stay). As usual, it was a day of milling crowds, rows and rows of comics (most of them indie and local publications), the usual suspects of longtime local comic creators/artists/personalities and a budding new crop of young grafictionists wanting to break into the local comic publishing biz.
Unfortunately this year found me without any publication of my very own, though of course my work in Mangaholix Presents was present in full force. As usual though I found myself being asked when the next Angel Ace book will be coming out. As I told them, it's still in the works. Yes, I'm still intending to release the definitive, compleat, final Angel Ace book. We'll see. Next year.
For the most part though, being untied to any particular booth or function I had the luxury to just mill around with the crowd, to check out this or that shelf, pick up this or that indie and just sweat it out happily. I picked up quite a few things, so that should be fun. I met up with komik comrades Ian Cang, Kriss Sison and the Groundbreakers, Carl Vergara, Budjette Tan, Ka-Jo Baldisimo, Elbert Or, Jaime Bautista, Gerry Alanguilan and of course Arnold and Cynthia Arre. Everyone was for the most part busy as bees till the Kon finished at about eight in the evening.
Happily, business was pretty brisk- as far as I know, copies of Issue 7 of Mangaholix Presents sold out in the late afternoon, as did copies of Budj's Trese. Carl's appearance at the Visprint booth also boosted sales of Zsa Zsa. That's the great thing about the Komikon- people are there for the comics, first and foremost... the odd cosplayer regardless.
Once again, I found myself going away from the Komikon refreshed and reinvigorated. Hopefully next year, same time, we'll have tons more Mangaholix and Ninja Girl KO as well as a book of my very own on offer. We'll see. For now, let's leave it at a nice feeling that at least once again, the Komikon proves that love for komics is not lacking in Manila.
