Super.

I like superheroes. I really do. My daily brain activity can be divided into four general categories:

20%  dazzling them with wit, baffling them with bullshit

20% beer, smokes, and other mood-altering chemicals

5% sex

55% What Would Batman Do?

My non-geek friends can never understand it, but I firmly maintain that the literature your grandchildren will be reading and discussing in their universities are being sold now at comic shops. And if you’ve read Y the Last Man, you know that I speak God’s truth.

Comics are clearly at the forefront of literature. They’re making movies and video games  based on these paneled stories. Hell’s bells, even literary cannon like Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis can now be found in comic form (<–this is AWESOME by the way, and you have to click it). It’s entirely possible that a person who has never picked up a comic book in his life would still be familiar with comic book icons. That’s how deep comics’ pop-cultural roots go.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to superheroes.

Can we just look at Batman for a minute? Just one minute.

Recently, a friend referred me to this link. To sum it up, there are many Filipino artists working in the American comics industry, rendering our favorite superheroes in glorious detail. One of them, Whilce Portacio, has grand plans of creating a Filipino comics artist network and such. I tip my hat to him. The Filipino comics scene needs gentlemen like you, good sir.

But what concerns me is his idea of creating a Filipino superhero as if he’s re-inventing the wheel.

First of all, it’s been done. There are Filipino superheroes in comics. From Captain Barbel to Darna, to Zsazsa Zatturnah, to Bayan Knights to Trese, to Andong Agimat. It’s  been done.

This is brilliant, by the way. Alexandra Trese vs. the storm Ketsana.

he question then is, why don’t Filipino superheroes work? Filipino comics writer, artist, and all around awesome man Gerry Alanguilan shares a few thoughts. I honestly think he’s on to something.

The superhero lives in an entirely fictional world and that’s part and parcel of the experience. Let’s drop all pretensions– I read Batman comics to escape. Oh, the art is well done, and Grant Morrison sold his soul to the devil to write gems like he does, but when all’s said and done, it’s escapist art.

Batman is a costumed vigilante beating up thugs and thematic criminals, with the ability to leap tall literary criticisms with a single bound. He’s the capitalist dream– billionaire playboy by day, above the law by night. He gets away with anything and doesn’t think about how that random Joker thug he crippled for life may have needed to feed a family of 12. To fund his elaborate batmobiles, batcaves, batcomupters and such, Bruce Wayne has cornered Gotham’s market with Wayne Enterprises. The batsignal is like a prototype of the Big Brother cameras used in George Orwell’s 1984.

But I try not to think about these things when reading superhero comics. In Batman’s relatively simple world, the biggest threats are homicidal criminal clowns. If you’re a student and one of your classmates has an ominous name like Humphry Dumpler or your professor is named Victor von Doom, PhD, then you know you’re running into a potential supervillain. So it’s time to pull on the kevlar and hockey pads to kick some ass.

This man’s name is JEJOMAR! To the damn Batcave!

Unfortunately, nothing is that simple in the Philippines.

On one hand, it’s not a far parallelism to say that Manila is like Gotham– a hotbed of crime, full of corrupt cops and scheming politicians. The difference is in those rare streaks of light: Police commissioner James Gordon can not be bribed or bullied, and you know Batman is Batman. Killer Croc, Two-face, Blackmask– everyone else is suspect, but Batman and Gordon can be trusted. Cookie-cutter good and evil with no shades of grey.

But let’s say some rich guy, heir to hectares and hectares of sugar cane plantation, or the business mogul of the chain of super malls decides to don a cape and mask to swing from building to building, beating up chumps who mug people for a living. Would that make for a Filipino superhero?

No. Because the cynical, logical part of us knows that the farmers who work in that sugarcane plantation earn less than 10 pesos a day, and the salesladies who work in the supermalls are forbidden to sit down through the 8-hour work day. The mugger was forced by circumstances beyond his command to steal from others. The masked vigilante then is not a hero, but a douchebag with a twisted sense of justice.

“I am the night.”

Batman’s Gotham and Superman’s Metropolis may be part of America, but they’re fictional cities of America. So while real-world New York, Chicago, or somewhere else deal with poverty, racism, and terrorism, all Gotham and Metropolis have to deal with is rampaging killer robots or the occasional death ray.

The Philippines is a complicated place. Good for writing hardboiled stories and comics, yes, but for superheroes? I’d put in Harvey Dent’s quote about heroes and villains from the last Batman film here, but that might be too much.

Even if we make fictional cities for the Philippines, it still won’t work for our Filipino superhero. For us to recognize that a fictional city is part of the Philippines, then it must still have the familiar characteristics of Philippine society. The same crime rates, the same corruption, the same appalling social gap. The same overwhelming rot that one man can alone can not solve. So already, your superhero is shot.

On a similar note, the Filipino superhero in a fictional city won’t work because there’s only one city. Well, there are many cities in the Philippines, but only one sprawling mass of chaos and that is Manila. You can’t expect villains like Lex Luthor or the Joker to make their bones pulling hoods over the eyes of Romblon cops.

Not this one.

This is where Darna– Old Darna– and Zatturnah got it right to an extent. By situating the superladies (I said ladies, not women) in unnamed provinces, the relative isolation of the place allows the story enough freedom to go wherever it wants to go.

Mysterious stone that falls from the heavens and grant our heroines superpowers when they swallow it? Sure. Now if something falls on a Manila girl, what are the odds that she’s going to put that in her mouth, let alone swallow (insert joke about Manila girls who don’t swallow, hur hur)?

The same rural isolation also allows giant rampaging frogs and villains with snake hair to terrorize the small town long enough for our heroines to fight and save the day. And while all of this is happening, the rest of the country remains unaffected. No one’s going to believe alien Feminazis came to wherever it is Zatturnah lives. You’re a small town, you’re not Manila.

Prove me wrong.

Not to say that we should support this ethnocentrism, but this is generally how cities with superhero guardians work. No matter how many Mayors get assassinated in Gotham city, America’s general socio-political landscape remains intact. Hell, even when the cataclysmic earthquake hit Gotham, decimated all infrastructure and unleashed the entire rouges’ gallery on an unsuspecting populace, what did the American government do?

Put a perimeter around the city and let those poor people sort their own problems. The result was the epic No Man’s Land storyline. No matter how crazy Gotham got, it was fairly believable because of its isolation from reality.

DAT ASS

However, because Darna serves as a local version of Wonder Woman, it’s difficult to completely claim her as a Filipino superhero. On the other hand, Zaturnnah thrives on the very essence of comics writing– building up on tradition and re-imagination. She may be Darna’s parody, but her conflicts and wit are original and Filipino.

My only problem with Zaturnnah, sassy superlady that she is, is that she’s a sectoral hero. She’s come to liberate the gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered from the oppressive claws of compulsory heterosexuality. While this is indeed a noble cause, we– that is, the Filipino people– still toil under the same socio-political chains.  Zaturnnah did not come to save me.

Who else, who else can we look up to? I’m discounting you, TRESE, even if you know how to make a good story in issue 3 and your art is superb. Because your main villain is retarded and offends my sensibilities. You want me to believe a supernatural DATU from BUKIDNON can be a PINTADO? Just because it’s comics doesn’t mean you can get away with lousy research. You want to write a Filipino superhero comic but you don’t know your own history, your culture.

Magnificent but WRONG.

So alright, let’s do a quick re-cap. The Filipino superhero must be A) Filipino (which automatically disqualifies you, Trese, because your villains come from some underworld that is clearly not Filipino), B) be the guardian of a Filipino city/ province (therefore the city/ province in question must clearly have the characteristics of Filipino socio-cultural landscape), and lastly C) heroic?

This last bit’s a killer. Because now I have bring up Andong Agimat.

No lie, I have a necklace just like his.

Andong is an ex-con. He’s poor as fuck, lives off alms and goodwill. Some could say he’s a racketeer. He’s got guns and he’s virtually indestructible, and he’s asking if he can have a meal and a few beers for free at the karinderya? You don’t say no to that kind of man.

He’s a dickback and he knows it. He’s a mercenary. The inept city cops pay him to kill criminals they can’t catch.

The ladies hate him but he’s got that charm. Maginoo pero medyo bastos, playing on the Filipino macho culture through and through.

He’s as dented and corrupted as the city he lives in (Manila, in case you’re wondering). He doesn’t want to save this city, he knows it’s already hell. But he’ll fight the big bad evil because it’s the right thing to do.

Andong’s a Filipino superhero, alright, but he’s a villain too. He’s like the Punisher in that respect. Andong Agimat got it right, but he’s no hero. He’s not saving anyone.

I remain skeptical of anyone who wants to make Filipino superhero comics because I doubt anyone can save us.

Someone like Superman, he can’t save us. With all his strength and x-ray vision, what can he do against centuries of ingrained corruption and systemic oppression? Not to sound like Luthor, but it’s not right for some outsider to fix our own mess.

Batman either, he’s got nothing. Some rich hobnob doesn’t know jack about how life is down here, why the criminals become criminals, why the law doesn’t work, and why, ultimately, a vigilante hiding in the shadows will only make things worse.

This is a long-winded post. GAHD I DON’T SHUT UP, but if you read all the way down here, you get rewarded with a one-paragraph summing up of everything I’m trying to say:

Before creating a Filipino superhero, we first have to establish what we’re fighting for. It’s the same question people ask of Batman: if Gotham is such a shithole, why do you fight for it? If the Philippines is a hopeless place, why do we bother? Who are we protecting? Are we on the side of the law, on the side of the people in power, or are we fighting for the masses? What are we fighting? A rogues gallery of corrupt politicians, army generals, businessmen ruled by greed, thematic criminals, or something else?

And are we winning?