Down at the poultry

Cultural Imperialism and Political Artistic Nostalgia

in Gerry Alanguilan’s Elmer

And while all of these things were happening on TV, nobody really bothered to mention the annual Komikon held every October-November in UP Diliman's Bahay ng Alumni, that loud and sweaty mecca of pop culture ephemera obscura that I hold so near and dear to my heart for four years running now, as it's a really wonderful place to be even if you only have a passing interest in komix, also a very sad place to be as always your budget is never quite enough for everything you want to get, but once a year, you get to meet the actual people who make the komix themselves—from the photocopied awkwardly-stapled zines to the full-colour glossies to the 250-page paperbacks —and you get to have your books signed after purchasing them—always a good thing even if you’re only a marginal reader of such things—pretty much all the latest books from the komix kulture’s amateurs and professionals alike of the past four years have debuted in the Komikon—this is where the renaissance is actually happening!—some of which are from San Pablo, Laguna-based artist Gerry Alanguilan, an industry great, he of Wasted fame, of Humanis Rex! and Timawa, quite possibly the closest thing we have right now of a komikero as pop star, also agent provocateur for the local manga scene as Alanguilan in the past had been widely wildly critical of locally-produced manga, really instigating and actively engaging with the manga debate with much spirit and moral high ground that it earned him quite a number of detractors in the largely online manga community.

And I say "in the past" as he has actually stopped actively talking about manga altogether these past few years, only merely referring to it via hypertext, and conversely the amount of good komix work produced by Alanguilan increased somewhat in place of the cloyingly critical debate, the latest of which is the awkwardly-named Elmer (Komikero Publishing, 2006-2008), a 140-page four-issue epic just recently finished the third week of November 2008, what he non-ironically earnestly refers to as "the Ultimate Chicken Story," the book being primarily about talking cocks.

It's working off of the novel scenario of chickens suddenly gaining sentience and the world's reaction to it, foregrounded by a story of a couple—Elmer and Helen, both chickens—trying to survive amidst the ensuing chaos, which is really the story of Elmer and Helen's son Jake coming to terms with his ancestral past and the sacrifices—literal and figurative—that his parents made for his and his siblings' survival. It's the great Filipino novel, with chickens.

It's a very catchy premise, a very off-Hollywoody premise, lots of potential to address quite a few things about society, about culture, about history, bits of which Alanguilan did address in the book, but being a UP undergrad for Malikhaing Pagsulat, I naturally glossed-over the good stuff and dovetailed towards the political implications of the book's initial concept and found it to be lacking, as very much like a chicken, Elmer's potential for real world politics never really take off, more content with being merely decorative, only bits of it explored somewhat but only in the service of the story, concentrating only on the more "interesting = fun" anthropocentric ripples—chickens in suits, chickens speaking in English, chickens masturbating to human TF starlets—than on the more "intellectual = real" ripples, of which the most interesting for me is the dietary choice of switching to ducks in place of chickens for fast food meals. I mean, why ducks? Why at all animal, even, when it's quite possibly safe to assume that each and every beast and critter in the world is quite possibly in impending sentience? Where are the vegetarians, even? I’d assume they’d take this particular development as vindication of their beliefs.

Also, the proposal of equating "humanity" with "sentience" as the book does—the UN declare the chickens as "human" because now they can talk—is carelessly tossed onto the readers without really getting into the messy business of telling the readers exactly why the change of status was necessary, and why the chickens—now "human"—choose to live human lives rather than sentient chicken lives: they choose to wear polos and pants, use celphones, write and speak English and presumably every other language on Earth *but* chicken-speak, don names like Frankie and May and Joseph—why so anthropocentric? It doesn't make much sense to me, in this komix reality, how one social previously-maltreated class would choose to live their now ideally maltreatment-free lives according to the norms of the very same social class that previously lorded over them. And not just lorded over them: massacred and ate them day in day out in the millions!

This is not mere anthropomorphism, Elmer is not Donald Duck in a sailor's blue billowing blouse. The chickens are actually quite literally declared as being "human," and in their resultant co-option of human culture (and in the resultant human co-option of chicken culture) is really a textbook example of the battle for cultural dominance—for intellectual and moral leadership of a society—between the passive wild (the chickens) and the dominant rational (us human beings) classes—and yes, the condition Alanguilan puts Elmer's world in ultimately dissolves the book into a discourse on class struggle—the situation in the book is so politically- and philosophically-charged it's actually a shame Alanguilan chose to limit himself to the basement level of the book's narrative potential that a lot of interesting elements—how can Jake be so complacent in his man-clothes masturbating to human TF star Anna Rosie while being the most sociopolitically-aware chicken of the story, bitterly critical of the dominant bipeds?—aren't even acknowledged as such. And these things are difficult for me to ignore as these things—Cultural Imperialism—are already codified into the very concept of the book.

Although eventually, all my posturing and strutting assertion of homebrewed Marxist ideals are moot (the story of my life) in the face of Alanguilan's singular frothing vision of the actual story he wants to tell, and in here I am moot as even after my diatribe, the story Alanguilan wants to tell is still compelling and no less important. It's still a story that needs to be told. It's still a story that needs to be read.

Between flimsy glossy covers, Elmer is about a lot of things: it’s a story about survival, about persecution, about sacrifice, about how history and progress are driven by loud and violent engines running on the fuel-blood of tyrants and martyrs, about acceptance, about family, how the value of parents being parents can only really be measured by what their children turn into when/if they leave the nest, about each and every cruel and beautiful thing we do to one another and how these very same cruel and beautiful things shape society as much as they do the individual, and really, this talking cock epic is really about what it exactly means to be human at the dawn of the 21st Century—yes, despite all my huffing and puffing about the dodgy political and philosophical implications of the chickens being declared "human," the book itself is quite successful in talking about "being human"—the squalor, the magic, the endless contradictions and compromises—in all this, Elmer quite possibly could be the first really mature Filipino komix. Not in the sense that it has gore and war and sex and swearing—it has all of those things—but it's also about how—and more importantly—why gore and war and sex and swearing happen, and what happens after these things happen, and what it all means in the greater scheme of things—all this in marvelous black and white linework most definitely worthy of being called "art."

Almost every panel in the book Alanguilan gives the reader meticulously-rendered pastoralia, an almost completely objectified world, where every leaf in a sideroad tree is of equal tonal value as the linings of a passing cloud or the contours of a steady pebble by the grass as beside it an art deco gothic bus speeds towards Junction, every detail is given the same amount of care and attention. There is "love" in this book, a sheer, palpable love for the art itself.

There's a scene early on in the book where Jake reminisces on one particular memory of a moment he spent with his now dying father where the father shares beer with his son as they watch the sun set, a very archetypal situation—a cliché—echoed throughout our collective consciousness of Hollywood-dom, but Alanguilan presents it as if it's the first time someone put pen to paper to capture such a magical moment, this sad sunset, as if he himself invented it on the spot for this moment in this particular book, lovingly rendered with the visual clarity of a 10,000 megapixel DSLR—it's bordering on the morbidly clinical—but you just know by the way the clouds twist in the sky as the perfect solar disk just about touches the distant Laguna mountains, how the blades of grass wave and undulate—yes, they undulate—in the wind, grazing the two fowls' plump feathered bodies—this amount of micro/macroscopic attention to detail is dauntingly consistent throughout the book—and you really simply have to admire the artist who can seemingly effortlessly convey "human" emotions through chicken faces without making them "look" human—you just know that Alanguilan is drawing from actual memory, drawing from actual life—the fact that the artist is a small town country boy is fused into the very core of the book's genetic information—for all its modern fantastic narrative elements, for all its gore and humour, Elmer is ultimately a very nostalgic book, a very sentimental book, not only because of the story's narrative drive—a son reading his recently-deceased father's diary triggering all the childhood associations of growing-up in a household maintained by people who had gone through something utterly traumatic (no less than an attempt of continuing genocide) and the son writing a book about the resulting messy murky scalding hot soup of memory and history—but also by the actual physical rendering of the art.

Elmer is a very nostalgic book artistically, sentimental for a bygone postwar era of Pinoy komix excellence—what Alanguilan believes as really the standard all Pinoy komix should measure itself up against, the quality to achieve—and often nostalgia and sentimentality in art is bad as the overarching high emotion—intense melancholy love for the inaccessible past—drains all the fun (i.e., life, humour, politics, et al) from whatever it's sentimental about, but in the face of the persuasive presence of a largely ignorant, absent-minded, and apolitical local komix culture of manga and superhero worship, of idealistic artistic bankruptcy, Elmer's artistic nostalgia for the heydays of Alfredo Alcala's and Nestor Redondo's and Francisco Coching's (among other luminaries) revolutionary rural renderings is a very informed, very aware, very political decision.

And it's really a pervasive presence in contemporary local komix production, these manga and superhero worship things, a presence so pervasive and absolute they can already be considered as Filipino pop culture—no matter (or maybe even because of) how manipulated or mixed their heritage is or morally-suspect—the komix equivalent of Koreanovelas and fantaseryes (themselves postmodernly enough more often than not based off of manga and komix)—either utterly derivative stuff or stuff completely separate from the immediate Filipino experience—they are already firmly ingrained to our lives and habits and wants that it's actually unrealistic to debate with it or fight it or even just complain about it—and all the sakuras are just very very very cute in their cat-eared headbands—what we can only do now is merely react to it, as Alanguilan has, with work that is acutely undeniably good, acutely undeniably mature, acutely undeniably sophisticated, acutely undeniably political, acutely undeniably Filipino. Ultimately, that’s what Elmer is all about. Not bad for a talking cock komix.