Skyworld Vol. 2

In the first day, I look into a story and I declared it good. The next day the story swallowed me whole, and it was better.

The flow of this second volume in connection with the first is mesmerizing as a fresh breathe of summer. Downplaying the shitty poetry here, I never imagined that this current cliche of resurrecting the dead old mythologies will take a new breathe of life in this electronic age of FB and Barack Obama.

The creators worked their part in story and art seamlessly and telling it from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch (with apologies to Dr Stephen Hawking) along with historical figures like Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio is a work just close to perfection. This graphic novel is not for the young readers though, especially when you encounter [SPOILER WARNING] that scene with the Asuang grabbing Rizal's baby boy straight from Josephine Bracken's womb. If you havent read this, better expect "graphic" scenes in this well-paced graphic novel. The artist just simply loves to decapitate both monsters and men here. The only flaw I see is Makabo's declaration of a fleshless and bloodless God only to be contradicted later about the belief that drinking the blood of the same God would give one powers terrible and unimagined.

As Joseph Campbell states in the chapter opener of his book The Power of Myth (The Journey Inward chapter); "One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light." The Skyworld story is a testament to that old idea. You may see it as a story somewhere from a parallel universe, or an imaginary Philippines but the bottom line here is still that ultimate quest for redemption that everyone is tasked to undergo.

Since the first volume, the Skyworld universe is connected with the world of Alexandra Trese and that's the reason why I highly recommend this for Trese fans out there. But apart from Trese, there are more characters joining the fight here. The story flies between history and the present, and this narrative flow is what I seriously like about it. I'm almost tempted to call this Skyworld story an Asuang Apocalypse given the sci fi elements but I better give it to more informed and mature readers to hand that verdict.

My only duty as a reader is to find out if the story is good or bad (from the original collection of 4 chapters or serialized issues in 2009) and my assessment so far is this---it's better.


Genre: Dark Fantasy, Urban Horror, Philippine Mythology
Rating 4.5 bags of rock salt out of 5