Baboy

I’ve read quite widely from American, Canadian and Japanese comics, but there are many countries for which I feel I have basically no understanding of comics culture. Before my next visit to the Philippines I want to get familiar with Pinoy komiks, so I decided to read from the wide selection on Penlab for the next year, at least one story each week.

Penlab publishes Filipino komiks and has works across multiple genres, and has both English and Tagalog comics. It seems like a great resource to dig in to what is being produced in comics in the Philippines and I’m sure I’ll branch out as I find threads to follow.

Today I started off with a comic of two issues to ease into things. Mel Casipit‘s Baboy (Tagalog for pig) is a comic about a boy who transforms into a werepig. The comic is in Tagalog, but it’s mostly textless and the the dialog it does has is easy to translate with a tool like Google Lens or with my limited understanding of Tagalog. The comic was published in two issues in 2008 and 2010, and there’s an obvious improvement in the art between the two issues. The story is short but packs a lot of heart and action into these two issues.