One of the reasons I started this blog was because of a Brit author by the name of Neil Gaiman. When he came here around 5 years ago, he shook up our world. For one, he made all the Filipino graphic novel readers come out into the open. Had it not been for him, we wouldn’t have realized that we numbered in the thousands. More importantly, he turned a mirror on us by saying that he was inspired by the legendary works of Filipinos like Alex Nino, Tony de Zuniga and Alfredo Alcala. Who are they? And how come this dude knows more about them than we do? Sometimes, we get so jaded by our culture we lose the magic of it. It takes a foreign eye to say that the manananggals (winged half ladies) and kapres (tobacco smoking giants) are awesome mystical creatures. He loves Filipino branded imagination. So much so that he started a yearly graphic novel competition with Fully Booked to get Filipino fantasy fiction noticed and more importantly, published.
I made a desktop of one of my favorite quotes by him. I translated it to Filipino because to a lot of his Pinoy fans, he might as well be.
On his last visit, RJ Ledesma got to talk with him quite a bit. Read the interview!
Test