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WHILE everyone else in his class was busy taking down notes, he was much more preoccupied doodling for as long as he can evade the prying eyes of his professors.
For an illustrator whose drawing skills were honed while not paying much attention in class, Julius Villanueva has drawn a semi-existent world that is very much like our own, yet very different at the same time—he makes comics.
To a certain extent, it is the same ordinary story. Villanueva started drawing at the young age of three, or as he vaguely recalls, even younger. He looked at the first books his mom gave him, and the next thing one could notice were the doodles drawn in them.
“My mom told me I did the drawings in it, but I could not remember doing them,” Villanueva said.

Sketchy beginnings

Villanueva did not start as a comic illustrator immediately. Being a graduate of AB Economics in the year 2000, the first job he landed into was in a money market trading business. Money-related endeavors may have been really far from his heart as he did not last long in his first job.
He also tried a number of other jobs including being an economist, stock trader, writer, researcher, and poet.
“I had no desire to work in a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. job again,” said Villanueva who was in between jobs back in 2003.
He admitted that he sometimes thinks of what might have happened if he was a doctor or paleontologist (those who study the prehistoric era), but then he added that he would probably be doing comic strips about talking organs or dinosaurs.

Although he knew that doing something other than making comics was more practical, he was inspired by Gary Larson’s Prehistory of the Farside where Larson detailed how he pursued working as an illustrator
despite the low compensation he gets.
Villanueva started out doing comics in newspapers.
“My first strip was a surreal and wordless comic about an anthropomorphized heart,” he said. “I thought at first that it was great but newspapers did not agree. So I had to start over and I came up with Life in Progress.”
Anthropomorphized means atrributing human characteristics to inanimate objects.
Life in Progress (LIP) is an anthology that showcases Villanueva’s original comic strips. Dinosaurs, aliens, cosmic deities, and self-referential jokes make up the world of Zeke, the protagonist hero in LIP. It tackles the sometimes boring and sometimes exciting life of a college boy.
This is pretty much the same with the world possessed by Villanueva given the fact that his characters are closer to him than one would think.
His work first got published in the Manila Bulletin last 2003. Later in 2006, the first 300 strips of his comic series were collected in book form.
“Regarding the characters, they are cartoon versions of people I know from college and from work,” he said. “Some of them are also entirely made up.”
Most people who know Villanueva personally would think that the lead character of the series, Zeke, is a cartoon version of himself.
“Zeke is a character from an unpublished short story I was working on when I was in high school,” he said. “He is entirely fictional.”
His college life has clearly been of great impact in his comics. Villanueva was a member of the Artlets Economics Society and Thomasian Writers Guild. He later on joined the UST Writers Workshop in 2001.
“It combines two things I love to do—draw and write,” he said, adding “I feel that it is just in the right spot between the rigidity of writing and the freedom of drawing.”
Originally, Villanueva wanted LIP to be one big story about the lead character’s growth as a person, but since the strip was not coming out regularly, it prohibited him from doing so.
“I began to digress a lot, making one off joke and focusing on other characters,” he said.
“Now, I do not know what it is anymore,” he finished with a blank humor.

Free spirit

He recalls one of his worst college experiences as having an unplanned slumber party at the St. Raymund’s building.
“I had to spend the night at the St. Raymund’s building because of a flood,” he said. “We had to wade through thigh deep sewer water just to buy food at Mcdonald’s.”
However, his best experiences involve being in the company of friends and just being as liberal as Artlets students could get.
“The best memories are too explicit to recount here,” he said. “It was hanging out with friends after class until the University closes, eating street foods in Dapitan, and playing Counter Strike instead of studying.”
On a more serious note, Villanueva added that one of the best things about being an Artlets student was “getting the feeling of being part of an intensely intellectual community.”

Life and comics

Villanueva has published a number of his strips in book collections namely Life in Progress volume 1, Life in Progress volume 2: Geek Machine Telemetry, Life in Progress: Volume None, and his latest volume, Life in Progress volume 3: Tales of Minor Awesomeness that was released late last year. Villanueva plans on releasing a fourth book which he hopes will come out before the year ends.
A nominee in the Komikon Awards 2009 for best comic strip compilation and best comic, Villanueva also makes another original comic series Punyetang World for Topak and Nosebleed Magazine, while another brainchild of his, Kalasag, momentarily came out in the Manila Bulletin.
According to Villanueva, “man could not survive by drawing comic strips alone” so he holds other jobs as well. He worked as a researcher for ABS-CBN’s Pinoy Big Brother and Pinoy Dream Academy from 2005 to
2008. Now, he works as a contributing writer for the Sunday teen show Good Vibes.
“Always experiment.” he said, addressing artists and writers alike as this might just make or break their career. Comics stumble through the years like everything else, unlike an artwork that stays frozen in time. As the title of his work suggests, this particular medium is entirely a manifestation of a life in progress