Blood And Guts And Prayles

AN EXCLUSIVE INSIDE LOOK AT THE HORROR TV SERIES, TABI PO

- Dodo Dayao

The canniest move Mervin Malonzo’s aswang comic Tabi Po makes is to set everything in the universe of Noli Me Tangere, not only slanting the familiar trope at enough of an angle to make it both familiar yet unique, but enabling its own tangential post-colonial critique on, among others, the misogyny and hubris of the clergy. The comic will eventually get to the present-day but the way Malonzo has it plotted out, Tabi Po will be nine books long with each arc breaking down to three books each. The third book in the first arc just came out.

There are four aswangs in the book. Elias, our de facto hero, the one whose story we essentially follow, is a man without a past, literally springing out of a gnarled tree, fully-formed and at first unaware of what he is, until his flesh-eater pangs take him over. Eventually he meets Tasyo and Sabel, who are both over 300 years old, and Salome, who we first see stark naked and chained to a bed, a sex slave to a lascivious friar.

Tabi Po was the crossover story of domestic independent comics and it’s easy to see why. There’s a classical rigor to Malonzo’s narrative aesthetic, linear and coherent but averse to lapsing into the formulas and clichés of the trope, while the art is jittery, wild, primal, and despite the severity of the blood and gore and violence, weirdly lush and beautiful. Quite frankly, the push and pull is intoxicating and it’s what makes Tabi Po cinematic. A film based on it was almost a no-brainer.