Digital copies available now @ Santelmo House Gumroad
Bonus: get the full script of Maharlika Vol. 1!
We recently reprinted new stock of Maharlika Vol. 2, available now at Manila Middle Ground! We’ll also be restocking with our consignment partners soon (select bookstores, Shopee, Lazada), and for those outside the Philippines, Vol. 2 is available on Hot Tropiks.
But in case you’re itching to get it at a lower price with no delivery time, we’re excited to share that you can now buy digital copies from the Gumroad page of Santelmo House, our little publishing outfit which houses our manga imprint RAYGUN!
Digital copies will include all chapters (Prologue to Track 5 for Vol 1, Track 6-10 for Vol 2) as well as all bonus content from the print version. Character notes, journal entries, articles, and more from the world of Maharlika.
This is new territory—we know our fans are willing to spend on the books (thank you!), but this digital model is still unproven at least for Maharlika. But it’s an important experiment for us: digital allows us to scale much more quickly, get the story in front of more people without having to pay upfront / wait for new physical print runs and go through middlemen. So your support here counts.
Bonus: Maharlika Vol. 1 script
As an exclusive bonus for digital buyers, we’ll be including a free copy of the script for Vol. 1! This is for those among you who are interested in how to write a comic script and the process of going from script to page:
Comic script is kind of a funny thing in that there’s no standardized formatting. Some prefer to do it freeform without any page or panel labels, and I myself stopped writing panel by panel after I finished writing Maharlika and started on More Power.
But you can already see the subtle differences in how I write the scenes vs. how John Ray interprets, paces, and choreographs them in a way that meshes with his storytelling style. He’s particularly gifted at tightening the visual pace of things and “using the gutter”—that is, letting the spaces in between panels do the work of moving a character from point to point. You don’t have to see Jisoo walk home from school; your mind does the work of imagining it in the interval between the previous panel and this one.
In most cases, the differences are subtle. For the most part, the final pages stay very close to the script I submitted to John Ray. But there are exceptions, like the opening of Track 1 which we replaced with a more direct hook into the mysteries that entangle the mind of our protagonist:
And the start of Track 2, where John Ray replaced a more noisy cyberpunk-y establishing shot with one that more quietly reflects the dominating, brutalist setting of the story:
Lastly—I won’t spoil it here, but did you know that the original script had a different song playing from the first cassette they examined from Akira’s briefcase?
I’ll leave you here to discover the rest of the variations between script and inked page. Now I’m not the most verbose writer—my scripts are pretty straight and to the point, and I trust my artist partners to imagine most of the details. So it won’t be a completely new and mind-blowing literary experience if you’ve already read the first volume. But I hope that some of you find value in diving into the script—and that I get to geek out with some of you about that process one day!
Thank you again for all the amazing support. I’ll add another button to take you to the Gumroad page below—and you may want to keep it bookmarked for when we release Track 11 Early Access here :)
(Not to mention: you can get a copy of Thank You and More Power #1 here, as well as More Power #2 and Night Gate #1 and #2 soon!)