ART TRIP 2: Komiks

In the late '80s when Counterstrike was still a figment of someone's imagination and komiks ruled, I was a part-time scriptwriter and illustrator.

This is one of my illustrations for Shocker Komiks:

ART TRIP 1: Mother and Child

One of my early watercolors. Done 20 years ago (1985)!
That is also how long I have been using mikimOnster as an alias.

SIDE TRIP 28: Promdi in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is the only place I’ve been to in the region where I truly feel like an alien. I don’t know why. Must be all those Chinese characters and neon signs and tall skyscrapers and flyovers everywhere that make it difficult for me to tell where I am in relation to a landmark.

My hotel was in Kowloon and, of course, I wanted to go to Hong Kong island, too. It being my first time to go there, I thought hard about the mode of transport I would take. Subway or bus and ferry? Since the Jordan Station was just around the corner, I decided to take the subway.

It was during the early morning rush and people were rushing like mad, swiping their wallets on the turnstile to pass through. WALLETS??!!! Yes, they were using their wallets to get past the rotating bars! Hmmm.... I thought perhaps that was the general entrance and I had to buy my tickets inside.

So, I took out my wallet and placed it on top of the scanner like the others did. The bars did not move. Waaaah! What happened? Embarrassed, I made a quick turn around and observed how the others did it. The same thing. People were just placing their wallets on top of the scanner!

Take two. I waited till there were just a few people queuing and placed my wallet again on the turnstile. Still the bars would not move! Aaaaargh!!! Retreat! People were looking curiously at me. Waaaaah!!!

I turned back in embarrassment and walked to the other end of the station. And there I saw an automatic vendo machine that sold single-journey tickets that could be used like we do here at MRT. Yaiks.

It turned out those people had magnetic prepaid cards inside their wallets that allow them to pass through the gates on a touch and go basis. Aaaaargh!

Paita ning tagabukid oi.

MTR Station

SIDE TRIP 27: Killing Fields in Cambodia

I can't fathom the depths of evil people are actually capable of. The bloodstained metal beds with iron shackles, the chilling devices for torture, the faded black and white photographs of those who perished in the genocide - - men, women, children, infants.... thousands of them. They stare straight at the camera, blank expressions on their faces, knowing perhaps that they were going to be killed soon.

Welcome to Tuol Sleng, the detention and torture center full of crude cells and torture devices used to extract confessions in Stalinesque purges of the Khmer Rouge. As hundreds of thousands of Cambodians slowly starved in the rice fields where they were banished, a select number of political prisoners and their families met a terrible fate inside the interrogation center. Tuol sleng was then known as the "place where people go in but never come out". Of the nearly 20,000 people who were known to have entered, only 6 are known to have survived. After interrogation, the victims were taken away to the farming village of Choeung Ek, killed and then buried in mass graves.

Today, a glass stupa stands in the center of what ïs now known as the "Killing Field", housing some 8,000 skulls and bone fragments - - chilling testaments to the insanity of a devil named Pol Pot.

I'm never going back to these places. Once is enough.


TUOL SLENG
one of the shackled beds


one of the paintings done by a survivor


photo of one of the victims


KILLING FIELDS
skulls