Running in, ignoring the cinema schedule by the entrance where five or six people always stood deliberating what to watch, we would brush past strangers and other boys in school uniform, our trajectories plotted through the long air-conditioned corridors of the mall to avoid the various temptations that lined its capitalist halls (including the arcade) until we arrived at the shop of our hearts’ desires. Its windows, covered with painted posters of masked men and women, sheltered under a primary-coloured electric display that announced its most hallowed name: CATS. (Comics And Then Some.)
For a moment, we would ogle at the comics on the New Arrivals rack, committing their covers to memory and silently promising to acquire them when we had more money, after which we would go directly to the bargain bins; James starting on the leftmost end while I worked on the opposite, thumbing our way through rows and rows of titles as if in a marathon, flip flip flip, until we met at the middle, ready to sort through two piles of bargain comics. We would debate on 30-peso copies of X-Men, Avengers, Batman and numerous other titles, eliminating possible purchases by creating an agreed-upon hierarchy based first upon the title’s character, then artist, then writer. On rare occasions when we came to a disagreement, we would split our money down the middle and dictate our own purchases, though most of the time, our tastes were in complete accord.
By the end of our ritual, a stack of five or six carefully-considered comics were rung up at the till and wrapped in the customary CATS plastic bag, complete with a crude drawing of Wolverine printed under its wonderful, acronymic logo. Manong Eddie would be waiting for us outside, as patient as ever despite the extra quarter of an hour of waiting, resulting in a drive home that transpired in complete silence, as James and I lost ourselves to the outrageous adventures of these fictional men and women.
James and I agreed: the world’s greatest comic book artist was Jim Lee. I also liked Erik Larsen on Spider-Man; but his replacement, Mark Bagley, couldn’t draw Carnage with the appropriate menace, in my view. At an early age, I had become acutely aware of the people who worked on these comics, and in my wildest dreams I imagined myself drawing the X-Men under the pen of my favourite writer, Chris Claremont. I spent hours scrutinising these comics, copying my favourite poses, memorising the costumes and learning the vagaries of super-hero anatomy; the intricacies of foreshortening and the convolutions of idealised musculature wrapped in spandex. James struggled to keep up with me, but in the end resigned himself to colouring my illustrations in deference to my burgeoning drawing ability. I suppose our tastes were still far from refined, and if you had told us back then that Neil Gaiman was far superior to Scott Lobdell, we would have argued you out of the room. As a nine-year-old who could draw Superman with a modicum of accuracy, I had pronounced myself an expert on these multicoloured worlds, and James was more than willing to share in my obsession.
James, in turn, proclaimed himself to be the real-world counterpart of Daredevil. He would sit in the corner of our room facing a crumbling dartboard, one hand over his eyes, a trained dart in the other, declaring: “I will hit a bull’s eye using only my ears!” He rarely made the centre of the board, but when he did, it was a cause for celebration, and we’d jump around the room in a mock-battle between Daredevil and the vampire, Morbius. For a while, I myself was intent on developing a keen psychic talent à la Professor X, but that ambition fell by the wayside when I failed to read my classmate’s mind during a critical science exam. Fortunately, I had gained some popularity at school for my art skills, and in the end it was this ability that I cherished as my one and only superpower.
It was 1991, the year of the Pinatubo eruption, when James and I were invited to stay over at our Lolo Doming’s house in Los Baňos to finally meet our long-lost uncle: Tito Fermin. According to my mother, he had lived in the States all our lives, hiding as an illegal immigrant, and it was only that year, when he had married into an American citizenship, that he was able to visit the Philippines without fear of recrimination. Both James and I were eager to meet our uncle, having heard that he was a comic book artist; one who actually made a living conjuring up the four-colour worlds we were so fond of.
It was with some disappointment that we learnt the specifics of his occupation: Tito Fermin was a cartoonist for neither Marvel nor DC, but for a small independent company known as Echo Comics. They produced a grand total of four titles a month, one of which was a black-and-white superhero comic that, Tito Fermin said proudly, he both pencilled and inked. We were slightly more impressed when he showed us samples of his work, but though his art had the romantic quality of classic Tagalog Komiks, it lacked the inflated modern dynamism that we had grown accustomed to.
Regardless of his artistic prowess, Tito Fermin was a striking character. Long, shaggy black hair spilled down from his head and his face was rounded out by a full beard which, in retrospect, made him look like a Filipino Alan Moore. His eyes had the hint of a Chinese slant; he spoke in a low, sonorous voice that commanded attention and, as with our grandfather (who we’d nicknamed Santa Claus) you could rarely tell if he was smiling under that beard.
Tito Fermin spent most of our first dinner talking with Lolo Doming, the details of which I can no longer clearly recall; only the slurred American accent that possessed my uncle in the midst of his soliloquies on life abroad and the inscrutable grunts that my grandfather contributed to the discussion. Rain hammered through the trees outside, splashing against the windows and conversation, the warm yellow light of the chandelier washing over the lazy Susan that pivoted food around the dinner table. James and I contented ourselves with fielding questions from Lola Lita, who we had insisted on calling Lolita in spite of her good-natured refusals. We asked her what superheroes were popular in her time and she shook her head as she replied, “My heroes were movie stars, ballet dancers and singers—Judy Garland, Irina Baronova and Frank Sinatra. Those three are my favourites.” And then she crooned a few lines from the song she always sang when she put us to bed, the song I will always remember her for:
Perhaps, as a consequence, as we were falling asleep that night, James confessed that he had grown tired of Daredevil. “I want to be Silver Surfer now,” he said. We contemplated the means by which James could acquire cosmic power and a silver board capable of space flight. I suggested that he find a way to contact Galactus while he mused on the existence of cosmic rays beyond our atmosphere, and after a while we simply lay in our beds for the thousandth night next to each other, our thoughts racing to find the path to James’s goal until, finally, sleep overtook us.