I’m not sure how popular or well-known Beerkada is among the non-UP crowd, but right now I consider the slice-of-University-life comic (that has now graduated into slice-of-adult-life stories) probably the second best local comic strip. First place being of course the seminal Pugad Baboy, which has been running what, almost twenty years now?
I digress. If you’ve read Beerkada, it’s far from perfect. It’s often corny, and sometimes he has too many of his own in-jokes. In the early strips, the author Lyndon Gregorio often blatantly rips jokes from other sources. I’m not surprised it hasn’t received as much mainstream attention as Pugad Baboy has.
The strip has its’ moments however, and the cast will often remind you of real-world people (with their idiosyncracies exaggerated of course). Personally, I prefer those strips where the author parodies common pop-culture references, and the sheer inaneness of such parodies is where Beerkada trumps Pugad Baboy.
I recently found out Beerkada had its’ own website at beerkada.net. In an attempt to attract a more global audience, the author actually translates those strips that have Tagalog content into English. Aside from the current (daily) strips, he seems to be posting the older strips online as well, albeit the archives still currently have a huge gap between 1998 and 2006. Still, it’s awesome that Gregorio recognizes the power of the internet to publicize his work and willingly distributes his strips online. Hopefully, Pol Medina of Pugad Baboy fame would follow suit.
Not being a regular reader of the Philippine Star, and the last Beerkada book I read having been 3-4 years old already, I went through the archives to catch up. Some choice strips so far:
Not surprisingly, most of the strips I linked were related to 80’s cartoon characters in some way. I guess one of the reasons I enjoy Beerkada is that Lyndon Gregorio and I are obviously of the same generation.
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