It all began with a deceptively simple question, posed by Gerry Alanguilan over the phone on a Sunday morning: What if Superman had to deal with the Apocalypse?

I was then asked if I thought there was a story in there, and if I wanted to write it.

Hell. Yeah.

I asked Gerry how many pages he thought this story should be told in. 200, he replied. (The final draft of Bathala comes to a grand total of 226 pages.)

So I ran with that question, accompanied by a lone costume design sketch from Gerry, which cleaved more to the Miracle Man school of superhero fashion (no cape) rather than the Superman look. (Ultimately, we ended up with a rather more Captain Marvel-ish aesthetic.)

I did my requisite research—in this case, largely Biblical and Nostradamus-oriented—and dove head first into Bathala, completing the first drafts of the scripts for the 7 issues within September and October of 1997.

Then…

Bathala didn’t happen.

***

The scripts went into the Drawer and pretty much stayed there for over a decade.

There was an abortive attempt somewhere in there to have the issues drawn by Kajo Baldisimo, but other than a number of pages from issue 1, that didn’t happen either.

In the meantime, a section of Bathala ended up being surgically removed by yours truly, and utilized for my novel Pelicula.

And the years passed, and the scripts stayed in the Drawer.

***

Then, sometime in October of 2009, Ace Enriquez asked, quite out of the blue, Who’s that character with the Alamat logo on his chest and can we do something with him?

The answers were, “Bathala,” and “Sure.”

When it became clear that Ace was indeed willing to take on 200+ pages, the scripts came out of the Drawer.

There I was, a full dozen years after the fact, and I needed to see whether this was a story that held up, and I was pleased to see that it did, that it still read like a good superhero story with some weighty subtext thrown into the mix. (And the memory of all that research came flooding back to me…)

***

So, for the record, what you will read in Bathala is the same story I wrote 13 years ago. Dialogue and prose have been cleaned up and tweaked some, but the narrative is the same. There are only 3 major differences, specifically: the new sequence I needed to develop to replace the hole left by my excision of the Czerneboch scenes; a climactic conversation that I felt needed to be changed from the original (and that decision was largely reflective of the difference between the writer I was 13 years ago, and the writer I am today, more than anything else); and the first sequence in issue 1 when we see Bathala in action (the original draft had a Superman II homage, which I decided to replace with a natural calamity instead).

***

So there. Bathala, after all this time.

Before I take my leave, I’d just like to thank Gerry, for asking the question in the first place; Budj, who’s stood by this character (and so many others), while their stories lay waiting in the Drawer; Kajo, who helped with the costume design during his iteration of the character; and Ace, who stepped up to bat, and keeps swinging for the fences.

And thanx to you, for picking this up.

Dave

i think i said that last time