Pounding The Keyboard

 “Sanctuary!”         --Quasimodo            Few years ago, I busied myself reading classic books. I then condensed them and rewrote and rephrased them a little to make them more understandable to kids.   A ten-year old child would find it difficult to be entertained by reading the original version of, let’s say, Dracula or Ben-Hur. But the condensed version, he or she would find that book more palatable. The colorful illustrations inside every book I condensed made it more entertaining.           I enjoyed this work (others of course would find it boring). Imagine being able to read a classic book for free and getting paid for it (right after I condensed it of course; but condensing it after reading it is quite easy, at least for me). Before that, you’d do a lot of convincing before you could persuade me to read The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo (which, incidentally, is one of Jose Rizal’s favorite books). I preferred reading contemporary books (and I

"Have you ever had one of those days  when you can't just win, Eeyore?"                                         -- Winnie The Pooh           And I was just reading this newspaper article about a depressed man jumping off a top floor of a condominium.           Depression, of course, is deadly.           Everyone knows how it can make you suicidal—how, suddenly, jumping from the top of a skyscraper seems a lovely thing to do. All of us, at some point in our life, have been depressed. I, too, had been depressed. I knew that I was depressed at that time because I had this thought then that jumping off from a skyscraper sans a paraglider seemed a lovely thing to do. Luckily, there wasn’t a single skyscraper around at that time.           These past few months, I have been feeling low and it’s not because I’ve been listening to Morrissey’s music. Yes, Morrissey’s music is depressing but no, it’s not the reason why I have been feeling melancholic th

                       Today, June 19, 2014, a Thursday, marks the 153 rd birthday of perhaps the greatest Filipino ever, Jose Rizal. A writer, a doctor, a poet, a journalist and a lover, Rizal, or Pepe as he was fondly called, was martyred by the Spaniards at Bagumbayan on December 30, 1896 at the age of 35.           But   every freedom-loving Filipino already know that. What every Filipino doesn’t know is that I was given the precious chance of writing a graphic novel about Rizal. Entitled Pepe: The Lost Years of Rizal, it isn’t big on genuine historical narratives but rather, it’s a fantastical and magical take on Rizal’s childhood—think of the movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.           In the comic book, the young Rizal (aged about 10) owns a magically powerful amulet and will be fighting, among others, a wicked governor-general, a horde of vengeful witches, hungry swarm of crocodiles, a wily talking crow and skeleton soldiers. Pepe is ably supported by t