Philippine International Comics Festival 2025
The Philippine International Comics Festival (PICOF), organized by Komiket, is a premier gathering bridging Filipino komiks to the world. Featuring over 100 creators, the festival offers free admission and includes global masterclasses, exhibits, live drawings, international and book launches.
I was pretty excited for this year’s PICOF, or the Philippine International Comics Festival, in 2025. This was my second time attending, and I was especially thrilled to launch my horror anthology comic, Bagat, with my good friend and brother, Jann Galino. I must have spent two solid months working on those comic shorts, and I even created an entry for the Kommunity community comics. However, I got a bit worried when the Patron of the Arts (POTA) event was announced for the exact same weekend. I had a feeling this wouldn’t be great for us, knowing a lot of people would choose POTA instead. Let’s face it, the demand for comics is a bit niche, and most attendees would rather buy stickers, trinkets, and similar merchandise.
The travel turned out to be incredibly stressful. Even though I had purchased an extra baggage allowance beforehand, I was stopped at the boarding area because my carry-on luggage was one kilo overweight. My options were clear: either dump my merch or cough up the cash to get through. Unfortunately, there was no way to verify my prepaid baggage allowance online. The Iloilo Airport had no internet access at the time, and the cell signals for both telecom networks were completely dead. I ended up paying around 2,600 PHP, which ironically cost more than my actual plane ticket. It took everything in me not to completely lose my temper.
(Please note that I’m writing this a year after the event took place, so please excuse the rambling and any mixed tenses.)
This year’s PICOF was held at the SM Megatrade Hall. It was much more spacious, and everything was thoughtfully laid out. The only thing missing was a horde of enthusiastic attendees ready to buy the wares we were peddling. While there was a decent turnout, for some reason, most people headed straight for the big-ticket publishers where the full tables were set up. Meanwhile, we were stuck in a small corner of the indie lane with very little foot traffic.
On day two, thankfully, a good friend I hadn’t seen in years dropped by to hang out so I wouldn’t look quite so pitiful sitting there alone. Once I had someone to watch the booth, I decided to do a bit of retail therapy. I walked around and bought several comics. I dropped by Gerry Alanguilan’s booth, manned by his wife, Ilyn. I also visited the comic power couple Bambi and Olan, fellow Ilongga komikera Lucia Asul, fellow CCP comic grantee Julius Sempio, and Yuri, who had just launched her zombie apocalypse comic, among many others.
When the event finally concluded. My contacts were actually over at the Patrons of the Arts event. They had gotten confused and thought both conventions were happening back-to-back at the same venue. At first, I thought POTA scheduling their event on the same day as PICOF was just an honest mistake. I was thinking how POTA is highly sus for having their event on the same weekend as that of PICOF.
In a nutshell, 2025 just wasn’t my year. I feel like I didn’t promote my work enough beforehand, so the poor sales fall mostly on my end rather than on the PICOF organizers.
