TRESE: Murder on Balete Drive

One of my hobbies is to collect comics, my collections are mostly Marvel titles and my favorites are the X titles;).

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During my visit in the province last week and since Bacolod airport was transferred to Silay so to get back to Bacolod, I have taken a shuttle bus. I will be dropping at SM (the mall) to meeting a friend.

And as I am waiting for this friend who happened to be an hour late to the agreed time (stupid friend and I came all the way from Manila for that matter). I decided to visit National Bookstore, this is the thing that I like about NBS, you can always disguised yourself to having fun reading books when the truth, deep inside your heart you want to kill someone by just keeping you wait for ages.

Then I spotted this particular book in black and white; TRESE: Murder on Balete Drive - revealed the title. I have not read any of Budgette Tan’s work before though at some point I think I have heard of the name from the pages of Jessica Zafra’s Twisted books but upon seeing the Alamat logo at the bottom of its cover, the rush of excitement suddenly became apparent. “I need to get a copy of this book” – in my mind.

I had a fun memories with Alamat Comics, some four years ago; I have traded to a friend the Gerry Alanguilan comicbook to a Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: Endless Nights. Can you imagine the luck? A 100 php worth of comics to a hardbound book that cost more that 2000 bucks hahaha, uh wait, that’s not quite true. The truth is, I have actually traded her the Gerry Alanguilan comics, A Jessica Zafra, Twisted (I think its the Sixth) and Bob Ong’s Alamat ng Gubat, she’s from the States so she’s dying for Pinoy writers and in return she gave me the Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Sandman: Endless Nights both in hardbound – ofcourse to my joy.

Back to the book, TRESE is fun to read, a bit of unusual but clever, it’s actually a brilliant piece of work. The author uses familiar characters and presented them in a new and unexpected way not typical of what we have usually seen or read on these characters. He makes use of these iconic Pinoy folklore characters in the most and wicked of ways - a detective who her line of duty is to solve the crimes that may have connected to the paranormal activities, ala X-Files. Imagine the White Lady was murdered?

The art was great, Kajo Baldisimo is a promising artist, give him more of years and he will be joining the league of Whilce Portacio, Leinil Yu, Gerry Alanguilan and Philip Tan to name few of Pinoy comic superstars who graces the pages of the mainstream titles of both Marvel and DC.