Jose Rizal #1 is the Epic Story of Filipino National Hero Reincarnated as a Manga Hero

Writer: Takahiro Matsui / Artist: Ryo Konno / manga.club Many of my experiences as a Filipino American in the Midwest have been predicated on stumbling upon information at odd times and then being prompted to do a lot of research. The most jarring of these experiences happened in 2016, after discovering Duterte and the Philippine presidential election through a clip from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. One of the more pleasant experiences occurred just this week, when I saw that manga.club was producing a manga based on the life of Jose Rizal on his birthday, June 19th. This was significant on two fronts: 1) I didn’t know my late mother shared a birthday with a Filipino national hero and 2) I had absolutely no idea who Jose Rizal was, but now I desperately needed to know everything.

When my mother passed away in 2011, I lost my direct connection to my ancestry. Thankfully, I am blessed to have extended family on the west coast and access to the internet which brings us to today’s spotlight two Japanese creators telling the story of a Filipino revolutionary. This is not a story I ever learned in school, so it took a second to discover how exactly this creative team came together. Jose Rizal was a polymath. An ophthalmologist by trade, Rizal was a prolific writer, visual artist, and a legit polygot. He was of mixed descent with Chinese, Japanese, and Tagalog blood and traveled across the world including Japan and even has a statue at Hibiya Park. He apparently quite the impre…