For twenty five years, Manix Abrera has worked on countless panels and pages as a comic artist, author, and visual storyteller. He is widely recognized for his long-running strip cartoons notable for their humor and incisive takes on Filipino society, published across newspapers, magazines, and graphic novels in the Philippines.
Abrera celebrates his expansive creative practice by both revisiting its emergence and looking towards its unfolding. In this exhibition, he traces the evolution of the worlds and characters that have lived in the pages of his famed works in Kikomachine Komix, News Hardcore, and his wordless graphic novels.
Presented in this collection are select master copies of the titles, alongside the artist’s recent explorations in visual storytelling. Handpicked by Abrera from a body of work spanning two decades, the stories showcase not only his dexterity with lines and words, but also the comic medium’s capacity to capture the essence of being human—“to connect, to question, to comfort, and to remind us that even in the most mundane moments, there is magic and humor waiting to be drawn,” as the artist reflects, alluding to the thousands of readers he has reached over the years.
Thus, beyond celebrating his years in art, Abrera frames the show as an offering of gratitude—”to the readers who found pieces of themselves in my drawings, to the artists who continue to push the boundaries of our medium, and to the everyday moments that have inspired every strip, every page, every silence.”
