[zerk]

Here's Gerry Alanguilan's response to Matt Fraction's excuse for Iron man's pinoy team.

Quote: This is the quote that made me really want to react: " but it was written for a predominantly > American comics audience, which resulted in me making > some choices for ease-of-reading rather than absolute > cultural accuracy. I made that call because I felt if > I had to explain and contextualize things for every > reader, it would've slowed the story to a halt." I really hate it when people make absolute statements like "cultural accuracy". It's the same kind of statements like "I'm not perfect!", when people are put to the task for their mistakes. Accuracy is NOT what we're looking for. Perfection is not what we're looking for. More specifically, I'm not looking for 100% cultural accuracy when a non-Filipino writes something about the Philippines, however marginal it may be. All I'm looking for is for me, as a Filipino, to look at it and feel that it's familiar. That it's something I can look at and say, "yeah, that's how it is." I don't feel that at all. I'm looking at it, reading it, and I don't feel it's happening in my backyard. It feels like it's happening in a different country. It doesn't FEEL Filipino. The "written for a predominantly American comics audience" annoys me more than anything else, because a genuine look at an exotic non-American culture is sacrificed for what the writer believes to be the intellectual convenience of the reader. The writer basically robs the reader of a chance to be educated, and be given a look at a culture that they probably wouldn't know much about. So to not alienate readers, they are given a picture of us that doesn't really look like us. Americans are insular enough as it is. I think it would do them a world of good to open themselves to things outside America more and not just look inside. I think they will become much better people for it. A letter writer to the Swamp Thing back in the 80's asked writer Alan Moore when he had visited Louisiana in the US, because he had captured the locale in his writing so well. The fact was, Alan Moore had never visited Louisiana. All he did was research. If Matt had indeed to his research to write about Filipinos, then I can conclude that Alan Moore is a much better researcher than he is.

wala lang...



@John

go, john , go.. hope you get to draw spiderman or hulk.