# Filipino Komiks

> The Philippines' newsstand comics magazines, from Kenkoy in Liwayway (1929) and Ace's Pilipino Komiks (1947) to the fall of the Roces titles in the late 1990s. Weekly or fortnightly anthologies of short Tagalog serials were drawn in black brush and pen in a romantic illustrators' manner: bold curving contours, hatched modelling, dense backgrounds. Casts were folk heroes, aswang and superheroines such as Darna; in the classic years colour was kept for the cover. The state used komiks too, to promote Marcos's martial-law policies and, under Aquino, to urge guerrillas to surrender in romances.

- Period: 1929–1999
- Where: Southeast Asia
- Origin: Manila, Philippines. The first strip, Kenkoy, appeared in the Roces family's Tagalog weekly Liwayway on 11 January 1929. After the war Ramon Roces founded Ace Publications (1947, with Tony Velasquez as editor-in-chief), which put out Pilipino Komiks, Tagalog Klasiks, Hiwaga Komiks and Espesyal Komiks, sold at street newsstands and sari-sari stores. When Ace went bankrupt in 1963, GASI, Pablo Gomez's PSG (1964), Mars Ravelo's RAR (1970) and the Roces-owned Atlas (the renamed Pilipino Komiks, Inc.) carried on. The Roces titles collapsed after Ramon Roces died in 1993.
- Branch: Pictorial & machine age
- Also known as: Komiks, Tagalog komiks, Philippine komiks, Golden Age of Philippine komiks
- Page: https://stylogeny.com/styles/filipino-komiks/

## Use it with care

Darna, Pedro Penduko and other komiks characters are still in copyright and keep being adapted for film and television, and the artists' pages belong to them and their estates: draw your own heroes, mastheads and roundels in the shared idiom, never ask an image model for these characters or for a named artist's hand, and label generated pages as AI-made. Publishers shredded thousands of original pages and few issues were archived or reprinted, so a fake 'vintage komiks' page easily pollutes a thin record. Aswang, amulets and the other creatures and figures of Philippine folk belief belong to living communities, and pre-colonial warriors stand for a national self-image: draw them with the dignity and research the tradition gave them, never as exotic decoration. Aswang lore has stigmatised a real province, Capiz, many of whose people object to its name as the 'hometown of Aswang', and village gossip has branded real neighbours, such as a widow with no one to help her, as aswang: never tie a monster to a named province, town or community. Do not costume living Indigenous peoples (the Igorot, Lumad, Aeta and others) as pre-colonial warriors or as creatures.

## How it works

- Draw the whole page in black brush and pen and model everything in ink: bold, fluid, curving contours, hatching and cross-hatching for light and volume, and spotted solid blacks. Keep tints and colour out of the interior.
- Work every panel out to its border: a forest, a nipa hut, a colonial plaza or a kingdom under the sea, drawn in full so the figures act in a dense, believable world and not on blank paper.
- Stage the cast with the anatomy, costume and lighting of magazine illustration and the adventure strip, in cinematic, flowing poses (as Coching learned from Hal Foster and Alcala from Franklin Booth).
- Hand-letter the Tagalog dialogue in balloons and the narration in caption boxes, and cut a serial into short weekly or fortnightly instalments of about four pages that each end on a hook.
- Take the cast from local lore and history: pre-colonial warriors, folk heroes with amulets, aswang and other creatures of Philippine myth, mermaids and village girls who become superheroines.
- Sell each issue with a colour cover under a hand-drawn masthead and issue and price roundels, and print the inside in black on cheap newsprint.

## Its design choices

Defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

### Layout & composition
- [Framed panels](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/framed-panels/) (defining)
- [Dynamic asymmetry](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/dynamic-asymmetry/) (characteristic)
- [Diagonal axis](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/diagonal-axis/) (occasional)
- [Modular grid](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/modular-grid/) (occasional)

### Space & hierarchy
- [Sequential narrative](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/sequential-narrative/) (defining)
- [Horror vacui](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/horror-vacui/) (defining)
- [Illusion of depth](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/illusion-of-depth/) (characteristic)
- [Layered information](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/layered-information/) (occasional)
- [Extreme scale contrast](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/extreme-scale-contrast/) (occasional)

### Typography
- [Hand-lettering](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/hand-lettering/) (defining)
- [All caps](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/all-caps/) (characteristic)
- [Ornamented display](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/ornamented-display/) (characteristic)
- [Script](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/script/) (occasional)

### Colour
- [Monochrome](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/monochrome/) (defining)
- [Light ground](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/light-ground/) (characteristic)
- [Full polychrome](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/full-polychrome/) (occasional)

### Form & shape
- [Naturalistic depiction](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/naturalistic-depiction/) (defining)
- [Stylised figuration](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/stylised-figuration/) (occasional)
- [Distortion & exaggeration](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/distortion-and-exaggeration/) (occasional)
- [Whiplash line](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/whiplash-line/) (occasional)

### Surface & texture
- [Painterly brushwork](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/painterly-brushwork/) (characteristic)
- [Carved line](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/carved-line/) (occasional)
- [Paper & letterpress bite](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/paper-and-letterpress-bite/) (occasional)

### Ornament
- [Restrained accents](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/restrained-accents/) (characteristic)
- [Emblems & badges](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/emblems-and-badges/) (occasional)
- [Borders & frames](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/borders-and-frames/) (occasional)

### Imagery
- [Line illustration](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/line-illustration/) (defining)
- [Comic & cartoon](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/comic-and-cartoon/) (defining)
- [Painterly illustration](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/painterly-illustration/) (occasional)

### Medium & production
- [Pen, brush & ink](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/pen-brush-and-ink/) (defining)

### Tone & intent
- [Communal & popular](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/communal-and-popular/) (defining)
- [Romantic & sensual](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/romantic-and-sensual/) (characteristic)
- [Playful & witty](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/playful-and-witty/) (occasional)
- [Agitational & persuasive](https://stylogeny.com/design-choices/agitational-and-persuasive/) (occasional)

Avoids: Generous white space, Flat, Halftone & Ben-Day dots, Gradients, Non-representational, Typography only, Straight photography, Rational & objective

Palette: #efe7d2, #171412, #7d7466, #c62a2f, #e3b23c

Typefaces: Hand-lettered Tagalog balloons (captions in boxes; capitals on the 1946 Halakhak Komiks cover; mixed-case pen lettering in Velasquez's 1929 Kenkoy strip, which mixed Tagalog, Spanish and English; Tony DeZuniga started at Liwayway as a letterer at 16), Hand-drawn masthead logos (the outlined, bouncing KOMIKS capitals under a script 'Pilipino' on Pilipino Komiks No. 78, 27 May 1950; the HALAKHAK capitals on a yellow band, 1946), Hand-lettered cover roundels and boxes (the issue number and date, BLG. 78 MAYO 27 1950, the price in a circle, and a boxed blurb naming the serial and its makers, DARNA by Mars Ravelo and Nestor Redondo, on Pilipino Komiks No. 78)

Known for: Romualdo Ramos (story) and Tony Velasquez (art), Mga Kabalbalan ni Kenkoy, Liwayway, from 11 January 1929: ruled pen-line panels with balloons mixing Tagalog, Spanish and English; Velasquez carried on the strip for decades after Ramos died in 1932; Francisco Reyes and Pedrito Reyes, Kulafu (from 7 July 1933), a Tarzan-like hero of the pre-Spanish Philippines (the southern Philippines in the Kulafu article, the jungles of Luzon in 'Philippine comics') who fights dragons and siyokoy (mermen), called the first coloured adventure strip in the Philippines; Halakhak Komiks #1 (15 November 1946), a postwar weekly with a colour cover, a hand-lettered masthead and Tagalog balloons in capitals; Mars Ravelo (story) and Nestor Redondo (art), Darna, from Pilipino Komiks #77 (13 May 1950): the original run lasted 28 issues, and the first Darna film came out in 1951; Pilipino Komiks then came out every two weeks (#87 on 30 September 1950, #99 on 17 March 1951); Francisco V. Coching, Hagibis (Liwayway, postwar, running fifteen years, filmed from 1947), El Indio (Pilipino Komiks; dated 1952 by Gerry Alanguilan, first serialised in 1953 according to the 2009 Vibal edition, restored in black and white by Alanguilan and Zara Macandili) and Pedro Penduko (Liwayway, 1954); named National Artist for Visual Arts posthumously on 20 June 2014; Larry Alcala, Kalabog en Bosyo (Pilipino Komiks, from 1947 or 1949 to 1983; Wikipedia gives both), a Taglish humour strip of two bungling detectives, filmed by Sampaguita Pictures in 1957; Alfredo Alcala, Ukala (Pilipino Komiks, 1950; filmed in 1954) and the Viking epic Voltar (1963), drawn without assistants in an engraving-like line after Dürer, Franklin Booth and Walter Jardine; Alex Niño and Clodualdo del Mundo Sr., Kilabot ng Persia (The Terror of Persia), Pilipino Komiks, 1965

## Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

- Influenced by: [American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/american-comic-book.md) (1934–1993)
- Alike in its design choices: [Underground Comix](https://stylogeny.com/styles/underground-comix.md) (1968–1982), 76% alike
- Alike in its design choices: [Bonelli Fumetto (Italian Popular Adventure Comics)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/bonelli-fumetto.md) (1948–present), 74% alike
- Alike in its design choices: [Argentine Adventure Historieta (Oesterheld–Breccia)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/argentine-historieta.md) (1948–1996), 73% alike
- Alike in its design choices: [Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/arab-independent-comics.md) (2007–present), 68% alike
- Alike in its design choices: [Persian Popular Narrative (Lithographs & Coffeehouse Painting)](https://stylogeny.com/styles/persian-popular-narrative.md) (1843–2012), 65% alike
- Alike in its design choices: [Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books](https://stylogeny.com/styles/lianhuanhua.md) (1925–1990), 65% alike

## Sources

- Wikipedia: 'Philippine comics' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_comics: Liwayway's first comic strip in 1929; Kulafu's Tarzan-like hero 'in the jungles of Luzon'; Ace Publications founded by Ramon Roces in 1947 with Tony Velasquez as editor-in-chief, publishing Pilipino Komiks, Tagalog Klasiks, Hiwaga Komiks and Espesyal Komiks; postwar anthologies of 36 to 45 pages; circulation rising from 10,000 to over 100,000; a golden age in the 1950s with sales at newsstands and sari-sari stores; the 1954 APEPCOM code; Ace's bankruptcy in 1963, then GASI, PSG (1964) and RAR (1970); developmental comics on family planning from the 1960s and comics as 'a tool for government public relations'; under martial law from 1972 the Marcos administration 'published comics to promote its policies'; 'GASI and Atlas, owned by Ramon Roces, continued to thrive' through the 1970s; DC's 1971 recruitment of Alex Niño, Nestor Redondo and Alfredo Alcala; under Corazon Aquino in the late 1980s, comics urging communist guerrillas to surrender, 'camouflaged as romance stories'; 47 weekly titles and 2.5 to 3 million copies in the mid-1980s; Roces owning 62 of 71 titles in 1992 and the monopoly's fall in the late 1990s; 'outdated printing and binding techniques' among the causes of the 1990s decline, without naming the process; a traditional format fixed by the 1990s of weekly issues of 32 to 48 pages in colour (the colour presumably the covers: AFP describes komiks as printed in black and white on cheap newsprint), priced at 17 to 20 US cents, made up of wakasan short stories and nobela serials of about four pages each, after John A. Lent; Coching's 'dynamic and intricate drawings'; Heidi MacDonald (The Beat, 26 October 2006) on the debt to pen-drawn magazine illustration such as Charles Dana Gibson's; Gerry Alanguilan on the traditional style as 'classical and romantic, delineated by luscious and graceful brushwork' and the debt to Franklin Booth, J. C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell and Frank Frazetta; genres from Kenkoy's humour and Kulafu's historical heroics to melodrama and fantasy)
- Wikipedia: 'Francisco V. Coching' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_V._Coching: born 29 January 1919, died 1 September 1998; Hagibis ran fifteen years in Liwayway; El Indio (1952) and Pedro Penduko (1954); retired in 1973; named National Artist posthumously on 20 June 2014; traditional komiks art described as 'Baroque', with bold lines and densely detailed backgrounds, after Emil M. Flores, 'Comics Crash: Filipino Komiks and the Quest for Cultural Legitimacy', Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature 7:4, 2004; the CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art on his 'dynamic curvilinear lines and tonal modeling, with a fluid undulating effect'; Alice Guillermo on the influence of Hal Foster)
- Wikipedia: 'Kenkoy' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenkoy: first appearance in Liwayway on 11 January 1929, written by Romualdo Ramos and drawn by Tony Velasquez; Ramos died in 1932; speech mixing Tagalog, Spanish and English) and 'Tony Velasquez' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Velasquez: born 29 October 1910; Ace titles Pilipino Komiks 1947, Tagalog Klasiks 1949, Hiwaga Komiks 1950, Espesyal Komiks 1952); the strip's first appearance is reproduced on the Kenkoy article
- Wikipedia: 'Kulafu' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulafu: created on 7 July 1933 by Francisco Reyes and Pedrito Reyes; the first coloured adventure strip and first two-page comic strip in the Philippines; a Tarzan-influenced hero who 'grew up in the jungles of Southern Philippines during the pre-Spanish era', where 'Philippine comics' has the jungles of Luzon)
- Wikipedia: 'Halakhak Komiks' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halakhak_Komiks: weekly, first issue 15 November 1946; cover of #1 reproduced in the infobox)
- Wikipedia: 'Darna' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darna: first appearance in Pilipino Komiks #77, 13 May 1950, by Mars Ravelo and Nestor Redondo; #87 on 30 September 1950 and #99 on 17 March 1951, a fortnightly schedule; the original series ran 28 issues; first film in 1951; costume of red with gold stars; a Pilipino Komiks cover of 27 May 1950 drawn by Redondo is reproduced in the article)
- Wikipedia: 'Pedro Penduko' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Penduko: a folk hero created by Coching, debut in Liwayway in 1954, aided by an anting-anting amulet), 'Larry Alcala' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Alcala: Kalabog en Bosyo, the comic misadventures of 'two bungling detectives' in Taglish, first in Pilipino Komiks in 1947 according to the text and 1949-1983 according to the works list; filmed by Sampaguita Pictures in 1957) and 'Alex Niño' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Ni%C3%B1o: born 1 May 1940; Kilabot ng Persia with Clodualdo del Mundo Sr. for Pilipino Komiks, 1965; recruited by DC in 1971)
- Wikipedia: 'Alfredo Alcala' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Alcala: born 23 August 1925, died 8 April 2000; first published in 1948; Ukala, 1950; Voltar, 1963; a mature style after the woodcuts and etchings of Dürer and the engraving-like drawings of Walter Jardine and Franklin Booth) and EBSCO Research Starters, 'Alfredo Alcala' (https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/alfredo-alcala: hired by Ace in 1948; Ukala filmed in 1954; Voltar's 'very detailed, intensely rendered illustrations'; never used assistants; studied Hal Foster, Alex Raymond and Lou Fine)
- Wikipedia: 'Nestor Redondo' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestor_Redondo: born 4 May 1928 in Candon, Ilocos Sur, died 30 December 1995; first US credit in House of Mystery #194, 1971; Swamp Thing #11-23, 1974-1976) and 'Tony DeZuniga' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_DeZuniga: began as a letterer at Liwayway at 16; Orlando and Infantino's scouting trip to the Philippines in 1971)
- Tom Spurgeon, 'A Short Interview With Gerry Alanguilan', The Comics Reporter, 14 October 2006 (https://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/resources/interviews/6314: the traditional Philippine style 'classical and romantic, delineated by luscious and graceful brushwork', with Alex Niño, Ruben Yandoc and Jess Jodloman as exceptions; Hal Foster and Alex Raymond as influences; Franklin Booth and J. C. Leyendecker as Alfredo Alcala's own influences, and Alcala in turn leading others to Frank Frazetta and Norman Rockwell; 'Coching's dynamic figurework', 'Redondo's graceful flowing brush strokes' and 'Alfredo Alcala's intricate detail'; Coching's 1952 El Indio; komiks used to wrap fish and original art shredded by publishers)
- Yuchengco Museum, 'El Indio' (https://yuchengcomuseum.org/product/el-indio-sb: Coching's El Indio, first serialised in Pilipino Komiks in 1953, restored in its black-and-white entirety by Gerry Alanguilan and Zara Macandili; Vibal Publishing, 2009)
- H. M. A. Leow, 'The Folk Stories Behind the Philippines' Superheroes', JSTOR Daily (https://daily.jstor.org/the-folk-stories-behind-the-philippines-superheroes/: after Soledad S. Reyes, 'The Komiks and Retelling the Lore of the Folk', Philippine Studies 57:3, 2009, pp. 389-417; komiks as 'exceedingly accessible modes of retelling stories' from the lore of the common people; the revival of the aswang; Kulafu in Liwayway from 1933)
- Cultural Center of the Philippines, 'CCP Visual Arts presents Komiks: Sining Biswal' (https://culturalcenter.gov.ph/press-release/ccp-visual-arts-presents-komiks-sining-biswal/: exhibition of 15 November to 15 December 2022, curated by Randy Valiente, with work by Coching, the Redondos, Alfredo Alcala, Alex Niño and Antonio Velasquez) and Cartoon Art Museum, 'Pinoy Power! A Celebration of Filipino Komiks' (https://www.cartoonart.org/a-celebration-of-filipino-komiks-original: Niño, Alcala and Redondo, 23 December 2023 to 19 May 2024)
- Nation Thailand, 'Museum redraws life of Philippines comics' (https://www.nationthailand.com/life/30294277: Gerry Alanguilan's Komikero Komiks Museum in San Pablo City, opened August 2016; komiks rented from neighbourhood sari-sari stores at their 1980s peak)
- AFP, 'Once-great Philippine comic industry fights for survival', Daily News Egypt, 21 October 2010 (https://www.dailynewsegypt.com/?p=124250: komiks, 'once the most widely read periodicals in the country', 'printed in black and white on cheap newsprint' and sold by street vendors; top titles selling 400,000 copies a week; Atlas Publishing 'once the country's largest komiks publisher', printing thirty titles a week in the 1980s)
- Noel Sales Barcelona, 'The Comics Wars', Bulatlat, 9 May 2009 (https://www.bulatlat.com/2009/05/09/the-comics-wars/: Atlas Publishing Co., Inc. 'is what used to be Pilipino Komiks, Inc. (PKI)', with Carmen Roces-Davila as publisher and Pilipino Komiks, Tagalog Klasiks, Hiwaga Komiks and Espesyal Komiks among its titles; the Roces family's GASI and Atlas dominating comics publishing even under martial law, then holding more than 70 percent of sales; Atlas sold to National Bookstore in 1996)
- Kentaro Azuma, 'In Search of Aswang: A Ghost Story, Monster and Sorcerer in Philippine Society', Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 12, 2012 (https://kyotoreview.org/issue-12/in-search-of-aswang-a-ghost-story-monster-and-sorcerer-in-philippine-society/: Capiz labelled the 'hometown of Aswang' and strong local objections to the label, including a town's protest at a 1999 film that used its name; village rumours branding a widow without kin or friends to help her, and an elderly widower, as aswang, which 'can create an implicit consent to justify practical discriminations and exclusions against specific persons'; for the caution)
- Wikipedia: 'Indigenous peoples of the Philippines' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Philippines: the Igorot of the northern highlands, the Lumad of mainland Mindanao and the Aeta; for the caution)
- Stylogeny atlas entries for ligne claire, lianhuanhua, jeepney art, the American comic book, story manga and Amar Chitra Katha, for the affinity notes

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From Stylogeny (https://stylogeny.com/), an atlas of graphic-design styles by Van Riel Online Services. How it is made: https://stylogeny.com/about/. Cite as: Stylogeny, “Filipino Komiks”, https://stylogeny.com/styles/filipino-komiks/