TAGALOG KOMIKS Issues No.1

This news item dated Dec.28, 1991, shows that a rare 1940 Batman No.1 comic book was sold for a whooping US$ 40,000. That was almost 16 years ago. Today, the price would have been doubled or probably tripled or quadrupled.

My father used to collect comics, both english and tagalog comic books. That time, he worked as a cartoonist at the Manila Chronicle doing a daily cartoon strip- Kosme the cop (retired) and few other characters- Chain-gang Charlie and Beelzebub- (he's now a well known and respected painter- Malang). Maybe , that's the reason why he's buying lots of comics then, to get , I think, some ideas for his work. That was in the late 40s up to early 60s. As a child, my dad used to buy me Dell, Gold Keys, DC and Marvel comics. Most of them got lost, gave it away to friends and relatives but some are still with me compiled in hard-bound books. The following Tagalog comics, all issues No.1, are some of my father's treasured collections, which I like to share in this blog. Hope you enjoy them.

THE MOVIES THAT MADE THEM A STAR

1. Joseph Estrada - Asiong Salonga

2. Dolphy - Jack and Jill

3. Boksingera Daw! - Susan Roces

4. Alyas Palos - Bernard Bonnin

5. Nina Bonita - Charito Solis

6. Trudis Liit - Vilma Santos

7. Bitayin si... Baby Ama - Rudy Fernandez

8. Haydee - Hilda Koronel

9. Mananayaw - Phillip Salvador

10. The Jess Lapid Story - Lito Lapid

VIDEO 48: A FILM BUFF'S PARADISE

A FILM BUFF'S PARADISEBy : Iris Ayong / Manila Times / 7 May 2004
Nestled in an urban jungle is a haven for those whose eyes were meant for moving visuals. Its walls are lined with all sorts of films on DVD VCD format.
For someone whose exposure had the regular swipe-my-membership-card kind of video shops, this will only have to be another one of those neighborhood stalls. So why would the likes of Lino Brocka, Nick Joaquin, Lualhati Bautista, Ricky Lee, Laurice Guillen, Jeffrey Jeturian and other noted storytellers trek all the way to West Avenue just to rent a couple of videos? Geez, maybe because there’s something more to it than housing that, which you may have seen on Philippine silverscreen.
Unknown to many is that this rare shop had been standing there for the past 15 years. The soft-spoken owner Simon Santos showed us around this haven. Video 48 (the name is culled from its address—48 West Avenue), a two-story unit where the popular titles in VHS, VCD and DVD are found in the first floor, while the laser disc and betamax copies are kept upstairs. Noticeable is a list of Oscar winners and another list of the best 100 films. More than 95 percent of the titles in the list may be found in the shop.
It all began in 1988 when movie home viewing was only made possible by the betamax and then a little later by the Laser Disc. Santos, a film-lover himself, collected his favorite films in these formats. His early collection of 200 titles included the films of Alfred Hitchcock, John Wayne, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Vittorio de Sica, Federico Fellini, Kurosawa and Almodovar. When his friends began borrowing his copies, an idea fell on his lap and kindled the urge to put up a video-renting business. "My family was then growing and I needed extra jinglers in my pocket," he said. "But is was a risky venture. Back then, in the late eighties, video shops were opening all over the country. Also, cable television networks were being established and film piracy was becoming rampant. I had to be careful of how these might affect the business, but I chose to offer renters an alternative by making my own collection of classics and art films available."
Santos, whose father is the revered artist Malang, travels to Singapore, Hong Kong and the US to shop for more prestigious titles like Trainspotting, Amelia, The Godfather series, Il Postino, La Dolce Vita, Z, The Bicycle Thief and Rashomon. And there’s still more—a shelf full of Western classics (High Noon, Shane), a row of Charlie Chaplin silent movies (The Kid, Modern Times), the musicals (Camelot, The Pajama Game) and Academy Award winners. Friends and those who frequent the shop also suggest titles, which Mr. Santos later dutifully searches in the net.
The place is simply Heaven for film students and film enthusiasts, but Simon wants to encourage others to expose themselves to these cinematic gems as well.
Video 48 is located at the Marisan Building, West Avenue corner San Francisco Del Monte Avenue, Quezon City.

MY FAVORITE ALL-TIME CLASSIC MOVIES

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1939) - Stirring adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel about the magnificent story of doomed love in pre-Victorian England. Haunting, a must-see film.

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939) -Political heavyweights decide that Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), an obscure scoutmaster in a small town, would be the perfect dupe to fill a vacant U.S. Senate chair. Surely this naive bumpkin can be easily controlled by the senior senator (Claude Rains) from his state, a respectable and corrupted career politician. Director Frank Capra fills the movie with Smith’s wide-eyed wonder at the glories of Washington, all of which ring false for his cynical secretary (Jean Arthur), who doesn’t believe for a minute this rube could be for real. But he is.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940) -Following a prison term he served for manslaughter, Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) returns to find his family homestead overwhelmed by weather and the greed of the banking industry. With little work potential on the horizon of the Oklahoma dust bowls, the entire family packs up and heads for the Promised Land in California. But the arduous trip and harsh living conditions they encounter offer little hope, and family unity proves as daunting a challenge as any other they face.

CITIZEN KANE (1941) -Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26. The film is basically about a group of reporters who are trying to decipher the last word ever spoke by Charles Foster Kane, the millionaire newspaper tycoon: “Rosebud.” The film begins with a news reel detailing Kane’s life for the masses, and then from there, we are shown flashbacks from Kane’s life. As the reporters investigate further, the viewers see a display of a fascinating man’s rise to fame, and how he eventually fell off the “top of the world.

CASABLANCA (1942) -A truly perfect movie, the 1942 Casablanca still wows viewers today, and for good reason. Its unique story of a love triangle set against terribly high stakes in the war against a monster is sophisticated instead of outlandish, intriguing instead of garish. Humphrey Bogart plays the allegedly apolitical club owner in unoccupied French territory that is nevertheless crawling with Nazis; Ingrid Bergman is the lover who mysteriously deserted him in Paris; and Paul Heinreid is her heroic, slightly bewildered husband. This is certainly among the most spirited and ennobling movies ever made.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) -George Bailey (James Stewart) has so many problems he is thinking about ending it all – and it’s Christmas! As the angels discuss George, we see his life in flashback. As George is about to jump from a bridge, he ends up rescuing his guardian angel, Clarence. Clarence then shows George what his town would have looked like if it hadn’t been for all of his good deeds over the years. Will Clarence be able to convince George to return to his family and forget suicide?

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954) -Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) dreams about being a prize fighter, while tending his pigeons and running errands at the docks for Johnny Friendly, the corrupt boss of the dockers union. Terry witnesses a murder by two of Johnny’s thugs, and later meets the dead man’s sister and feels responsible for his death. She introduces him to Father Barry, who tries to force him to provide information for the courts that will smash the dock racketeers.

WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (1957) -Agatha Christie tale of a man on trial for murder: a trial featuring surprise after surprise.

12 ANGRY MEN (1957) -The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father. What begins as an open and shut case of murder soon becomes a mini-drama of each of the jurors’ prejudices and preconceptions about the trial, the accused, and each other. Based on the play, all of the action takes place on the stage of the jury room.

TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) -Generally considered as the ultimate Film Noir (and the last film of the genre), Touch of Evil is certainly one of the most macabre, bizarre poignant films ever produced in Hollywood. The director Orson Welles is of course the man who made Citizen Kane, but many Welles followers such as Peter Bogdanovich actually consider Touch of Evil better than Kane as a matter of fact the best film Welles has ever directed.

MY 10 BEST HITCHCOCK MOVIES

1. THE 39 STEPS (1935) -A man in London tries to help a counterespionage agent, and is soon finding himself in one jam after another. Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) is a Canadian visitor to London. At the end of "Mr Memory"’s show in a music hall, he meets Annabella Smith who is running away from secret agents. He accepts to hide her in his flat, but in the night she is murdered. Fearing he could be accused on the girl’s murder, Hannay goes on the run to break the spy ring.

2. REBECCA (1940) -When a naive young woman (Joan Fontaine) marries a rich widower (Laurence Olivier), they settle in his gigantic mansion, where she finds the memory of the first wife maintaining a grip on her husband and the servants.



3. SPELLBOUND (1945) -Psychologist Ingrid Bergman tries to solve a murder by unlocking the clues hidden in the mind of amnesiac suspect Gregory Peck. Among the highlights is a bizarre dream sequence seemingly designed by Salvador Dali—complete with huge eyeballs and pointed scissors. Although the film is in black and white, the original release contained one subliminal blood-red frame, appearing when a gun pointed directly at the camera goes off. Spellbound is one of Hitchcock’s strangest and most atmospheric films, providing the director with plenty of opportunities to explore what he called "pure cinema"—i.e., the power of pure visual associations.


4. NOTORIOUS (1946) -A woman is asked to spy on a group of Nazi friends in South America. How far will she have to go to ingratiate herself with them? Following the conviction of her German father for treason against the U.S., Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman)takes to drink and men. She is approached by a government agent, T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) who asks her to spy on a group of her father’s Nazi friends operating out of Rio de Janeiro. A romance develops between Alicia and Devlin, but she starts to get too involved in her work.



5. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951) -Strange thing about this trip. So much occurs in pairs. Tennis star Guy (Farley Granger) hates his unfaithful wife. Mysterious Bruno (Robert Walker) hates his father. How perfect for a playful proposal: I’ll kill yours, you kill mine. Now look at how Alfred Hitchcock reinforces the duality of human nature. The more you watch, the more you’ll see. "Isn’t it a fascinating design?" the Master of Suspense often asked. Actually, it’s doubly fascinating.



6. DIAL M FOR MURDER (1954) -A suave tennis player (Ray Milland) plots the perfect murder, the dispatching of his wealthy wife (Grace Kelly), who is having an affair with a writer (Robert Cummings). Amazingly, the wife manages to stave off her attacker, a twist of fate that challenges the hubby’s talent for improvisation.



7. REAR WINDOW (1954) -Photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (James Stewart) is, in fact, a voyeur by trade, a professional photographer sidelined by an accident while on assignment. His immersion in the human drama (and comedy) visible from his window is a by-product of boredom, underlined by the disapproval of his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), and a wisecracking visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter). Yet when the invalid wife of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) disappears, Jeff enlists the two women to help him to determine whether she’s really left town, as Thorwald insists, or been murdered.



8. VERTIGO (1958) -James Stewart plays a retired police detective who is hired by an old friend to follow his wife (a superb Kim Novak, in what becomes a double role), whom he suspects of being possessed by the spirit of a dead madwoman. The detective and the disturbed woman fall in love and...well, to give away any more of the story would be criminal.



9. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) -A hapless New York advertising executive (Cary Grant) is mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, and is pursued across the country while he looks for a way to survive.



10. PSYCHO (1960) -Anthony Perkins is unforgettable as Norman Bates, the mama’s boy proprietor of the Bates Motel; and so is Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, who makes an impulsive decision and becomes a fugitive from the law, hiding out at Norman’s roadside inn for one fateful night.