I was living in the Philippines at the height of the Groovy Age and missed much of what was happening back in the USA at the time. A few of my comics came from the Naval Post at Sangley Point. Though we weren't Navy, it was the closest U.S. Military presence, so we shopped there.
More of comic books came from the warehouse of an importer who lived in the same village outside Manilla. Don't get the wrong impression there - we're not talking huts on stilts or anything. It more resembled an enclave - 15' walls with broken glass embedded in the tops, guards with very shiny machine guns guarding the gates, etc.,. Ferdinand Marcos' brother-in-law lived across the street from us. So our Village was a Village about as much as Federal Express or the Federal Reserve are Federal.
Across the street
(highway) from the main gate were some little markets where we could buy triangular fire crackers
(like the paper footballs from school days - you can see the potentials there, right?) and Filipino comics. They varied heavily in look and tone, but some were so lushly rendered and inked that i wound up spending firecracker money on them, even though i couldn't actually read them with my limited knowledge of Tagalog and Spanish
(at the time).
Here're the original inked art used for a half dozen comic covers by
Alex Nino from back then:
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I love the contrasting textures of inks in this piece - the richly rendered living mortal
against the starkly delineated timeless/immortal/unliving beings. |
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| I'm guessing that's an Asuwang at her side. Think shape shifting bloodsucker with a fondness for enemy's livers and no need to pair a wine with it. Also gets the hots for pretty girls, but we'll skip that part for this pic. |
Readers might expect that the covers often have superior artwork to sell on flash while the interior work is perhaps more staid, focused on story telling. Rarely do i remember that being the case. The stories seemed to involve insane amounts of work in the rendering and texturing, and the effect was wonderously alien by comparison to the comics i'd seen from back in the USA.
So, imagine my delight when some of those artists started to show up in U.S. based titles not long after i returned to the United States.
(And that probably explains my predilection for Warren's magazines right up front, eh?)
In 1977,
Satan's Tears was released - a limited edition collection (1000 copies, s&n) with about 150 pages of Alex Nino. I think i got married that year, too. But, i'm sure that this book came out then, and it was packed with arty goodness. There were b&w reproductions of some old Filipino comic covers, some single pages from the interiors, and a whole lot of full page portfolio prints, sorted by time period and focus.
Let's take a gander at some of the richly textured line-work of Nino's art, as well as some, like this first pic, using magic markers -
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Ever wonder what it would look like if Alex Nino did Jack Kirby?
There ya go! |
I don't know what it is about that last pic, but i love that guy. I have an urge to read or tell stories about him.
Hmm...
Did i forget to mention how much i enjoy Nino's use of colour?
As you might note by the print patterns, two of these images were not full page, including this last one.
all artwork by Alex Nino from Satan's Tears-The Art Of Alex Nino (1977)
