Reg yuson biography sample

Budjette Tan is a Filipino comics writer, best known for a horror/crime comics series TRESE which he co-created with illustrator Kajo Baldisimo. We were all recently very excited to hear that TRESE is now being developed into a Netflix animated series! Here, Budjette generously shares about the behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating the comics since 2005.

How did you arrive at comics writing and why do you like it?

Reading comics is a childhood love, so I started to write my own, even as a kid. I read some books about how to write screenplays, at that time that was the closest thing that resembled comic book scripts. I was lucky enough to have a group of friends in school and college who also share the same love. When I was graduating, I convinced my friend to make comic books with me and asked my parents to let me go to attend the San Diego Comic-Con in 1994. I thought, “I’m going to bring a comic to pitch. This is going to be my big break.” We printed 1000 copies, brought them to San Diego, gave them away to editors. Yeah, none of them called back, haha. But there is something about the mix of art and copy – visuals and words – that makes it more appealing to me than making a movie or writing prose. It’s a different kind of magic to be able to tell a story through the comic book medium.

Which comics writers do you admire the most and why?

The biggest influence has been from Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison. I like the format that Warren Ellis created for Planetary and Global Frequency, a series of standalones that builds up to a bigger storyline. I love Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, in which he posed the questions, “Where did all the old gods go? What happened when people stop worshipping them?” I took the same questions and overlaid them in the Philippine context when the cities started to rise. What happens when tikbala, the demon horses, don’t hang out in the rural provinces anymore and have to challenge people