Thursday, January 04, 2007

Hi. Happy New Year to all of you!

I'm very sorry for not being able to update regularly this "other" blog of mine. But no, this is not yet a dead blog..I will keep on writing about Philippine komiks history here so I hope you will drop by from time to time for updates and new discoveries.

The holidays, instead of giving me ample time for research, kept me busy more than ever. As you may have read in my previous entries, I am researching on the early Philippine cartoons from the Spanish era to the pre-war period.

I was able to discover so many interesting materials like an old comic strip from the Philippine Revolution era, as well as some turn-of-the-century comic strips from period newspapers. I am not sure if luck or serendipity kept me on unearthing some of these very important materials, but I will eventually share them here with you, just like what I did in the past.

Last night, as I was browsing through some of my old komiks files, I was able to find this inserted one of the pages of a very old komik book:



The world's smallest Tagalog Komiks, a free comic book inside a Bubble Gum wrapper. Cool!

Well, as far as I know, this is the smallest Tagalog komik book ever published. Actually, it was never published at all in a regular manner. During the 1950s and 1960s, a Bubble Gum factory called Columbia Candy, sold bubble gums with this miniature komik book (created by Tony Velasquez) inside as a freebie. It is very possible that the previous owner of the komiks bought a Columbia chewing gum and got this miniature komiks free. He then inserted this small komiks to the komiks he was reading(now my komiks), as a page marker.

Anyway, that's what just came to my mind, but maybe there are other circumstances behind. What is more important was that I was able to discover this. This miniature komiks is just a very exciting dicovery for me. The only other person I know who has one like this is my friend and fellow komiks collector Architect Alex Villaflor. But instead of Kenkoy, he has got the title "Kulafu" the character created by pioneer comics illustrator Francisco Reyes.

Well, all these materials I am gathering will find their place in the komiks museum I am envisioning in the near future.