The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Gerry Alanguilan may be best known to a lot of US and UK comics readers for his work alongside the likes of Leinil Francis Yu for Marvel, but he’s been extremely busy in his home comics scene in the Philippines, with work across a range of subjects, being involved in the comics convention scene and also with his efforts to record and preserve the history of the Filipino comics industry, making that history available online (something we highly approve of); you can find details of all of these on his excellent Komikero site, which is well worth bookmarking for anyone with an interest in the medium. A couple of years ago he self published a series of comics called Elmer; we were lucky enough to obtain a small supply of them to share with our customers -- and also, obviously, so we could get our hands on them to read them ourselves. Set in a world where the humble chicken has grown in size and mental capacity to become a sentient being, Elmer could, in less skilled hands, have been a child-like story of talking animals, but Gerry, like Orwell in Animal Farm, takes the child fable-like idea and uses it to comment on morality, family and prejudice, without standing on a soap box to do so.

I’ve been quite surprised that no publisher had decided to take it on an publish Elmer as a graphic novel collection for the wider market; it seemed like perfect comics material for a number of Indy publishers, but sadly nothing seemed to be happening on that front. Until fairly recently when Dan De Vado and the Slave Labor Graphics crew announced they would be publishing the collected Elmer this winter. As you can guess from the previous paragraph, we’re recommending it to you when it comes out (see the most recent of our monthly Most Wanted look at upcoming books we’re keen to read). Elmer was featured recently in Previews and is available to pre-order now; in the meantime, to whet your appetite, I’m delighted to welcome Gerry as the latest contributor to talk us through some of his pages with his ‘director’s commentary’:

(cover for the collected Elmer to be published by SLG this November, by and (c) Gerry Alanguilan)

The question I am often asked about this project is “Why Chickens?” The most honest answer would be because I just love chickens. I love to observe them. I love to eat them. And I love writing stuff about them. I’ve lived with chickens all my life. They make so much racket when they pass by outside my window everyday.

One day as I passed by a particularly paranoid bunch of chickens along the road, I wondered what could they be thinking as they see me pass by. I wondered what they would say if they could speak. What if they had the same intellectual capacity as me, what would they say and do? Would they get mad and freak out and attack me for eating them? Would they organize? Would they believe in God?
Would they marry?

All of these ideas just came rushing out that I just had to write it all down and contain them into this one story.

When I first started writing Elmer, this was not the Page 1 I had in mind. In the first scene of my first draft, the scene opens with a  chicken pecking for food on the road. Little does the chicken know that he is already being stalked by a human hunter. The human attacks, but he trips. He falls on the chicken as the chicken screams “FUCK!”. Then from off panel we hear “CUT!” and we pull back
to see that they’re actually shooting a movie. And the chicken, whose name is ELMER, is the star.

In this first draft, I had Elmer in a completely different role. Elmer was an actor (as opposed to Francis), and the story was told from his point of view (as opposed to Jake’s).

I went so far as illustrate a Page 1, which shows Elmer alone on the road with a completely black background:

(the original but aborted opening scene for Elmer by and (c) Gerry Alanguilan)

For a long time that first scene remained intact, but something about it felt wrong to me. I felt it was too gimmicky. It also felt too familiar. Too many stories have already opened that way. I felt like I was repeating something other people have already done. I wanted to try something else. So I set Elmer aside and continued to work on other things, which at the time was Humanis Rex! for Fudge Magazine, a local Philippine Magazine.

After a few months of additional research, I felt I was ready to start on Elmer again. By this time I had already read things like David B’s Epileptic and David Mazzucchelli’s City of Glass, two works which have inspired Elmer to a great extent. The discipline to do the nine panel grid came from City of Glass, while the placement of the words and balloons came from both Epileptic and City of Glass.

I ditched the opening scene altogether, but used it for a different character much later in the story. Having been used to this world of chickens by that time, I was sure the reader wouldn’t find the scene too gimmicky anymore.

But I guess I couldn’t help get away from doing a gimmick because I replaced one gimmick with another one. After setting up the first few pages through a narrator going through some very human things (dreaming, thought fighting with his brother, Internet surfing, masturbating, cursing, panicking), I would reveal that the narrator is, in fact, a chicken. I felt it was a twist or a gimmick (whichever you prefer), that I felt better about using. It’s a play on the racial sensitivity of people who feel they don’t get jobs only because of the colour of their skin, blind to their other qualities that make them undesirable to be hired. Part of me felt it was still too gimmicky, and entertained thoughts of taking it out. In the end, I’m glad I stuck with it.

(nerves causing insomnia right before an interview in the opening of Elmer by and (c) Gerry Alanguilan)

It was important for me to show perfectly human activities being exhibited in the first few pages. This is to convince the reader that a human being is doing this. I didn’t want to hesitate showing nudity and the subsequent masturbation that follows because when a  human male is alone, nude pictures and masturbation usually come hand in hand, no matter how much a few people out there deny it. Why else would people laugh at this scene? It’s uncomfortable recognition that makes them laugh.

Page 3 looks like it went through digital replication, but honestly, I drew every panel from scratch. There are a few examples of digital replication elsewhere in the book which involves zooming, but for this particular page, I wanted to draw it all because I didn’t want to show the stiffness that usually results from digital replication. There are certain nuances of expression both in the female’s face and hands which I felt were very important in helping tell the story on this page.

(after several pages of point-of-view scenes we finally see our protagonist in Elmer, by and (c) Gerry Alanguilan)

And when the reveal is made that it’s a chicken doing the narrating in Page 4, it becomes funnier. Also, it takes some of the edge off the social commentary and hopefully allows the message to seep through. And that’s basically, I’m going to be talking about humans here. I’m just using chickens to make it funny and while people are laughing and pointing at the talking chickens, their defences come down just a tad slightly which allows me to talk about very human things. Things that people normally shut their hearts and minds from when they encounter it.

Having a narrator, in particular Jake and not Elmer himself, is an idea which came to me shortly before I began the final draft. I felt Elmer, as a character, needed some distancing from the reader to allow him to become sort of mythic. I wanted the character to be seen through the haze of nostalgia and poignancy. I thought I could achieve this if I allow another character to tell Elmer’s story. Eventually, I decided to allow several characters to tell Elmer’s story, which end up overlapping at some points.  Sometimes they match, sometimes they don’t. That makes it even more interesting to me. The haze of memory brings out different versions of the same story from different people.

I did feel bad not being able to use my original page 1 because I really liked it. I ended up using it as the cover to issue one of the original series.

FPI would like to thank Gerry for taking the time to share his director’s commentary with us; the collected Elmer will be published in November by Slave Labor Graphics. You can follow Gerry’s musings on the comics medium, posting of his art and that of others he admires and his frequent videos via his Komikero site.