Hi, I’m Rob. How this all came about is that I asked Scout Magazine if they’d be interested in having me on board. (I asked Romeo Moran, in particular, the editor for this fine magazine.) We kind of put it together over a couple of DM conversations, and I had an idea for how to do this where I wanted to make editorial cartoons/comics like Asaf Hanuka, the Realist, and all the contributors for The Nib, another online publication on Medium that regularly puts out thoughtful comics.

So this is what Misery + Comedy is about. I’m just hoping to try and do something like The Realist or The Nib but for our local context. It’s hopefully a good way to just make stuff that is funny some of the time and kind of depressing, too. Hence the name, Misery + Comedy, which I just feel encapsulates the Philippines accurately. We’re miserable but we find some sort of comedy in all this.

So this wasn’t supposed to be the first comic we’d start this new column off with, you’ll see that one next week. We moved it around because I wanted to start of relevant, on the topic of holy week a week after holy week. The idea behind this is just seeing a lot of people tweet about their holy week experience, how they are surrounded by their fake friends, their fake families, all putting up a front of holiness despite being shitty people. I don’t know what it is about our country that makes us so hypocritical about being good people and dealing with religion, where sometimes you consider yourself a #blessed person who has never done wrong because you go to church regularly, yet you hurt people. What the hell, right?

I asked Gia Densing, a journalist and friend of mine, to help out on account of I might not fully know what the things happening around the Philippines or the world as in depth as a journalist person. I’m just a comics guy. I approached her with the idea of us collaborating on this since I wanted to work with her on a project for some time, and so glad she said yes. Well we’re trying it out. This week we came up with the concept together, she wrote the dialogue for this, and I kinda had it in my head how I wanted this to look. Which you kinda see now. I have nothing else to add. Hope you like us. I am going to go away now.