Lapu-Lapu

1. Originally published in Pilipino Komiks from November 1953 to September 1954, Francisco V. Coching's Lapu-Lapu is a 25-part komiks serial that was reissued in book form by Atlas Publishing in 2009. This is the first graphic novel to be featured here in Atisan Novels. For illustrated novels such as this I will only comment largely on their literary aspect: the use of language to depict beauty, narrative and meaning; its visual aspect I will leave to more qualified critics and practitioners of that particular art.

2. Lapu-Lapu is of course considered the earliest Filipino hero, even before there were Filipinos in the islands not even collectively called the Philippines yet. Filipinos were taught this in early school--that Lapu-Lapu fought against, and eventually killed, the man who claimed to have first voyaged around the world, Ferdinand Magellan. Only much later would students learn, if they were lucky enough, that the source of his heroism was an account by Magellan's chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta. This travel account called Primo Viaggio Intorno al Mondo could be Coching's main source of most historical details in his narrative. These precolonial events we also read in later history textbooks, of course, although rendered in ways less dramatic and descriptive.

Coching's contribution lies in his own imagination of Lapu-Lapu's life outside Pigafetta's gaze. Here Lapu-Lapu had a strong huntress and Sultana, Miraha, for a beloved, and he had to fight against Datu Rahab and the Chinese Kim Long in order to win her hand in marriage, even if he already had her heart secured. His younger sister was Yumina, who fell in love with Arturo, a member of Magellan's fleet. Enrique, Magellan's translator, who considered Lapu-Lapu and his men as his own people, also figured heavily in the narrative. The story was inevitably romantic; it was a hero's story, after all. The story had to end in Lapu-Lapu's success in battle, for why spoil his victory with our privileged knowledge of how things would eventually turn out, only a few decades later, after Legazpi successfully established a colonial system in the islands? Novels have the luxury of a happy ending, of an end, at least.

3. The editor of Atlas admitted that Lapu-Lapu was one of the titles they chose to reissue because "it was part of our history." It was indeed a good marketing choice: I imagine teachers requiring their students (in grade school, and maybe even high school) to read this novel in order to get a glimpse of Lapu-Lapu's life despite the text's obvious fictionality. Jose Rizal, with his novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo and the eventual mass production of their komiks translations, set the tone toward this mass confusion between history and fiction. Meanwhile I look forward to other komiks novels from Atlas.

~ After Francisco V. Coching's Lapu-Lapu (1953-54)