Trains of Thoughts II: Playbill Scrawlings from the Filipino American Correspondent

Now. I am a sucker for what I call “Narrative Appropriateness.” When the sequences of events in a story, or in a life, manage to hold mirroring significance to each other. When the universe decides to showcase that it has a sense of humor and makes you think about how everything is somehow connected, how out of all the tracks you could have chosen, you have found yourself at this particular stop pondering similar questions whether by design or happenstance.

Francis Manupaul’s Superman is still my favorite rendition of the character.

This time five years ago, I wrote my first editorial for Black Nerd Problems, titled Trains of Thought on Asian American Representation in Comics where after reading a series of disparate articles, I mused on what all of it meant to me, weaving in different anecdotes about the ways I sought representation. For the better part of December 2022, I had been working on this particular piece, this missive, this meditation on what it meant to be a mixed Filipino American writing for this site called Black Nerd Problems, trying to once again weave all of the disparate threads together to tackle an assortment of topics.  As such, it is somehow fitting that as I was struggling to figure out how to start the sequel. I was fortunate enough to see A Strange Loop, a musical about a fat, gay Black man writing a musical about a musical about a fat, gay Black man writing a musical about… You get the jist of it. And we’ll talk more about A Strange Loop late…