PEKPECHA KUCHIKUCHA: More Than A Few Words On Designing Carljoe Javier's Geek Tragedies

As Carljoe Javier's debut short story collection GEEK TRAGEDIES nears its print release - supposedly around the first week of July 2011 - I would like to write more than a few words about the book, only not about the book itself per se - I already did that in my intro for the book (yes, I wrote the intro for the book) - but about how Carl, Josel Nicolas, and I went about designing the book.

I've been friends with Carl for a little more than half a decade when he decided to compile what pretty much turned into GEEK TRAGEDIES. I worked on the book back-to-back with his second book THE KOBAYASHI MARU OF LOVE, a book of essays about getting over heartbreak. KOBAYASHI was more or less drafted, drawn, and done in a little less than a month, more because besides being the main designer, I was also the artist, and the artistic workload for KOBAYASHI wasn't as intense as GEEK's - I will write about designing KOBAYASHI somewhen in the future, but in short: I planned and drew everything inside of a week, half a dozen plates, and finetuned them as I was working on the initial draft of the layout.

Compare KOBAYASHI's half-dozen plates to GEEK's fifteen major plates, pencilled and drawn by the ever-professional ever-good Josel Nicolas, fresh out of college and looking for a job, and ways to fill his portfolio, GEEK being one of them (haha), plus the half-dozen bits and pieces like the profile art stuff and the paragraph breakers and endmarkers, etc etc, and I had to not only colour all these things but also design and lay them out and sometimes even letter them - it is not too much of an exaggeration to call GEEK TRAGEDIES as one of my most intense - and most fulfilling - design jobs ever.

The easiest (and quickest) part of designing GEEK was the initial planning: my book design impetus has always been to let the book's contents dictate the design, from the first few zines I did with UP UGAT up to asking my mom to stitch-up a house for Chingbee Cruz's ELSEWHERE HELD AND LINGERED cover reprint. I'd been privy to Carl's fiction for about as long as I'd known him, most especially his more recent stuff, when he ultimately ditched his Ultra Pinoy Realist Mode (in the Dalisay sense) and embraced his Ultra Geek Fantasist Mode (in the BIG BANG THEORY sense), so I was familiar with nearly all of the pieces compiled in GEEK, so deciding what to do with GEEK's book design was quick and easy - from coins to stamps to baseball cards to cartoons to comic books to video games, pop culture geekdom has always been majorly defined by nostalgia for ephemerical mainly American esoterica, and this is truest and purest and loudest and proudest in comic book geekdom, and so: GEEK will employ the distinct visual idiom of American comic books.

I thought the perfect American comic book company to homage would be early Marvel Comics, as compared to early DC Comics, early Marvel Comics portrayed the alienation, isolation, the pure unadulterated j'accuse misunderstanding that geeks feel they receive from society at large, ie, geek tragedies. Once this was settled, pairing what comic book covers to which story was very very very easy, as like most comic book readers, I more or less possess a photographic memory when it comes to early Marvel Comics covers (and to be honest, the covers we used for GEEK's design aren't too obscure, in fact are the more iconic/famous covers rendered by the more better-known artists in Marvel's history).


And so I went through a couple of internet comic book databases and found the covers I was looking for. As I collected the covers, I was also thinking about the possibility of tying all of them up into one coherent narrative, a narrative other than their pairings with the stories, a narrative all their own, to basically turn them into a continuing serialised story. And so I thought putting in recurring characters in the GEEK homages would be the (easy) way to inject a narrative, and so the three main characters were born.

The three characters were (obviously) based on famous Marvel characters, but also were based on what I thought were the three main geek archetypes Carl was portraying in his stories:

THE BOY WEAVER was based on Spider-Man, meant to portray the sensitive writer geek.

THE INDELIBLE DORK was based on the Hulk, meant to portray the bumbling, socially-inept geek.

THE IRON MAC was based on Iron Man, meant to portray the techie geek, with Mac being Carl's choice of tech.

Josel Nicolas has always been (and will always be) my first choice as artist in the book's interiors. Josel and I already share a pretty good, pretty streamlined working relationship based on quite a few projects we both shared, some of them seeing print as books, either as yet again the main designer (like in Fox Books's horror antho PALALIM NANG PALALIM, PADILIM NANG PADILIM, edited by Beverly Siy, the first book Josel and I worked on together) or as colourist (in DOC BRICK, Josel's cancelled serial in kiddie magazine KZONE), so, like in any worthwhile collab work, Josel and I both already developed a conversation shorthand when we talk about art and comic books, ie, when one is saying something, the other knows what it is about even when it is vaguely said.

And so I eMailed Josel some rather vague notes paired with the comic book covers I downloaded from the net and in two weeks' time, after a few suggestions from Carl and me, Josel had eMailed me the fourteen plates, all pencilled and inked (in fact, the GEEK plates are quite possibly one of his last few pencilled-and-inked drawings, as nowadays he almost exclusively draws everything in pentab), and it was my turn to work on them.




I coloured them first, first hewing closely to the original covers' colour scheme, see if they still work design-wise. Colour harmony is one of the trickiest things in design, and when you're colouring an image that easily has more than four loud colours in it, making them not clash - or more often in comic books, clash louder - intentionally is an art in and of itself. Again, as someone who grew up reading and loving comic books, I love obnoxious drawings with loudly flat pastel colours that clash starkly on the page (comic book colouring, even at its most garish, establishes a certain harmony that is undoubtedly unmistakably its own) so colouring Josel's drawings, even if/when very time-consuming, was one of the happiest things I've ever done in front of my computer (haha).


And normally, even when I had the main colours locked in, when I put in the GEEK TRAGEDIES title banner, I had to readjust more or less the entire image, and then readjust the title banner again, and then readjust the entire image again, etc etc, in a repeating cycle, up until I achieved what I felt was image harmony. And this tug-of-war doubled and tripled when the image called for things other than the title banner, like word balloons and captions and decals and whatnot, all of which need their own readjustment and recolouring in tandem with the title banner and the main image.


And the biggest joke about all this work designing and colouring and lettering everything is that aside from the front and back covers, none of the plates will be printed in colour, as GEEK's interior pages are in black-&-white. And so, yet again, further readjustments were employed to make them look good in black-&-white. Keep in mind that all this work was done in full knowledge of this fact - I felt that the entire long and winding process of everything was necessary to come up with exactly the kind of work we eventually came up with. At the very least, Josel and I are better artists because of it! At the very least, we have fourteen potential tshirt designs we can print and sell and earn money from. Also: local eBooks publisher Flipside will be releasing GEEK TRAGEDIES as an eBook for the iPad and Kindle and whatever Droid gadget you may have, with all of the art in their full-colour majesty! So all is not lost.

And this was how Carljoe Javier's GEEK TRAGEDIES' design was planned, drawn, coloured, and laid-out, and after nearly a year, the book will be out on the shelves care of the UP Press.

Here are the GEEK plates, with the original Marvel Comics covers, with some commentary.

Here is my original eMail to Josel, outlining the design plan.