Sand and Dreams

The story of Alex Niño

It was clear from the beginning that Alex Niño came from a different mold. He was a maverick, not necessarily by choice. When he drew, he heard the beat of a different drummer and felt the breath of a different muse. While others tried to emulate the Raymonds, Fosters and Redondos, the wind blew from a different direction for Alex. His unique style streaked across the world of comics like a tornado. It amazed some and frightened others. His very first attempt to sell his artwork for the comics was dismissed by the editor as “weird,” “strange,” and “What th…??!!”

In the summer of 1946, in the province of Tarlac on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, a six-year-old boy crawled under his parents’ bamboo shack and with a short stick started to draw figures in the sand. This is where it all began for Alex Niño. While the other kids played noisily outside, Alex drew in the sand for hours with his usual companions: a menagerie of animals consisting of his dog, his parents’ pig, and their chickens.

“Those were the happiest days for me,” he recalls. “I’d be down there drawing and then wiping the sand clean with my hand and starting all over again until it would get so dark that I couldn’t see. By then, even the chickens and the pig would be back in their pens. Except for my dog. He kept me company until I was called for supper.”

The other thing young Alex enjoyed was going to the movies, “I especially enjoyed the old serials they showed once a week. One of my favorites was The Spy Smasher.” Most comic book illustrators learned how to tell a story from masters like Milton Caniff, Harold Foster, Will Eisner and Alex Toth, but not Alex Niño. “I learned story-telling techniques from the movie serials. I learned to pace my panels from watching all those old serials. Every final panel on each page should be a cliff-hanger. The idea is to keep your reader engaged to the point where he can hardly wait to turn the page to find out what happens next. I learned that at an early age.”

However, for Alex, the basic format for his chosen profession was completely alien to him. At the time he decided to draw for the comics, he had never seen an original comic page; did not know any comic book illustrator to give him an idea on how the process worked. For the longest time he thought comic books were drawn one at a time. Repeating the process over and over again. The idea that they were the product of a printer never entered his mind. “It wasn’t easy,” Alex confesses. “I really had no idea how to submit a comic book story.” He would draw his pages the size of a large poster. “A near-sighted person wouldn’t have a problem reading my pages several feet away,” he laughs. For a moment he gets nostalgic. “All I wanted to do was to draw.”

And draw he did.
 
Alex came from a God-fearing, hard-working, tenacious family. His grandfather swam everyday in the ocean until he was one hundred and ten years old. Alex learned to persevere and if the road to success is filled with potholes, then he has had his share. Some of the bumps he experienced were enough to discourage any dedicated and ardent devotee of the arts. Some are but faint memories, while others capriciously linger like unpleasant dreams that refuse to go away.

He likes to recall one in particular. “It was one of my very early attempts to be a comic book illustrator,” he says with a sardonic smile. “I was given a short story to illustrate by some publisher with the promise of getting paid a week later. So, a week later, I took the bus for the long trip to the city to collect my money. When I got there, I found the doors to the office locked. I cupped my face against the window and I could see that the place was empty. They were gone!” He laughs, in spite of himself. “Here I was, stranded in the big city, alone and without any bus fare for the trip back. I walked around for a while trying to figure out what to do. I was hot, hungry and tired when I saw a barefoot man waiting for a bus. I went up to him and asked him what his shoe size was. It turned out we wore the same size, so I sold him my shoes for my fare back to my province.”

“Another time,” Alex continues, “I did illustrations for a magazine. On the way to the publisher it started to rain. I held the pages over my head so I wouldn’t get wet. By the time I got to their office I was soaking wet and so were my pages. Some of the blacks on the pages had started to run. At first, the guys at the office were really excited that I had done a wash style of drawing. They asked me what type of India ink I used.” Again, Alex has to stop, because he’s laughing so hard. “What India ink? I asked. I had used black shoe polish.”

Most of the publishing firms where Alex began his career were not of the caliber of Ace Publications, which was the biggest and best known at the time. One of them was a small publication run by an elderly couple. “The rate at the time was five pesos per page. If you wanted to be paid in advance then the rate went down to four and a half pesos. Aside from running their small publishing business, the wife also owned a small fish stall just outside the gate of the building. On the way out, you would have to walk past the fish stall where the wife would expect you to buy some of her fish. If you wanted to make sure that you’d get another assignment, then you’d better buy a bunch of fish. In the end, most of the money I just collected went right back to the company.”

It wasn’t long before Alex’s talent was noticed by some of his contemporaries. Notably, some of the giants of the industry.
Alfredo Alcala was an artist whom Alex always admired, so when he got a call from him asking Alex to work for Alcala Komiks, he was thrilled beyond belief. Alex was in awe to be in the company of Alcala, Redondo, and Coching—­masters of the Philippine comics. What he didn’t know was that they were in awe of his work. So there was Alex, a Young Turk—the new kid on the block—being praised by the giants of the comics at that time. Flattered and thrilled, he sowed his wild oats.

“My friends and I would spend all night hitting the night spots and just having a good time. I was young and flying high,” he remembers. “Until one day a friend of mine showed me a group picture of a graduating class from an all-girls school. Then my friend asked me. ‘Would you like to date any of those girls?’ ‘Sure.’ I said. ‘Pick one,’ he said ‘and I’ll introduce you to her.’ There were so many of them it was hard to decide which one to pick. So I figured ‘what the heck?’ I covered my eyes with one hand while I twirled my finger with the other and landed it on one of the girls in the picture. Two years later I married her.”

In 1971,Tony de Zuniga brought Joe Orlando and Carmine Infantino to Manila with the hope of recruiting some Filipino artists for DC. Most of the artists were being represented by Nestor Redondo and were at the tarmac to meet them. Redondo remembered that the first words Carmine said after that long, tiring flight from New York was, “I need a drink!”

Joe Orlando asked for Alex Niño who wasn’t in the group with the others. “What a lot of the guys didn’t know was that I had been sending Joe samples of my work long before he came to the Philippines,” Alex explains. The next day, most of the artists gathered for a meeting with Orlando, Infantino, and de Zuniga for a chance to show their work. Later in the day Joe asked to see Alex privately. “When I went to his hotel, I asked if he would return my samples that I’d been sending him. Joe laughed and said, ‘No, no, no, those are mine and I’m going to save them because one day they’ll be very valuable and I’m going to be a rich man’.” The very first script that Alex did for DC was “To Die for Magda.” Like an uncontained brush fire, Alex’s art had swept to the shores of the United States.

In August 1974, Alex was invited for the World Science Fiction Convention in Washington, DC. Before he got on board for the long flight his wife kissed him goodbye and told him to try not to get lost. Alex chuckles, “Here I am on a plane, headed for a strange country that I’ve never been to, and she asks me not to get lost?” Asked what his trip to Washington, DC was like, he says, “It was an experience I’ll never forget. There were people there who were already familiar with my work. But best of all, I met a young man by the name of Byron Preiss. He wanted me to do some work for his fledging book publishing business. Byron and I became very good friends. After a year I went back to the Philippines and I would be doing a lot of work for Byron’s illustrated books.”

In 1976 Ralph Bakshi was working on an animated feature called Wizard. Being familiar with Niño’s work, he invited Alex to work with him. “There was so much red tape for my papers with the government of the Philippines prior to my departure that when I finally got here, the damn project was over,” Alex lamented. “But, all in all, it wasn’t bad,” Alex explains. “That same year I was invited to the San Diego Comic Convention. On the last evening of the con, while we were all having dinner, I hear somebody call my name from the stage where they were handing out awards. I was being given the Inkpot Award! Can you believe that?” Alex exclaims. “I was completely blown away! Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine that.”

After he calms down, Alex continues. ”While in Detroit, I got a phone call that had a profound effect on my career. It was from Bill DuBay asking me to come to New York if I was interested in doing some work for Warren Magazines. When I got to New York, I went directly to the offices of Jim Warren. I was greeted by a very pretty young lady by the name of Louise Jones who introduced me to Bill. Then, down the hall, she re-introduced me to Carmine Infantino who was sitting in a dark office. Right then and there, they gave me my first job, inking Carmine Infantino’s pencils. Then I returned to the Philippines where I continued to do a lot of work for both Warren and Byron.”

After a few years I wrote Byron and asked if he could help me find a way to return to the States. I wanted to stay and work there. He offered to sponsor me. Finally, in 1983, St. Patrick’s Day, I moved to the U.S. of A. for good. In as much as I worked for him as his employee, he would also act as my agent. That’s how I was able to work for a host of other companies.”

By the mid-eighties, aside from his work in the comic book industry, Alex started doing a lot of work for different animation companies. “Some of those companies are no longer here,” Alex recalls. “Places like Southern Star and TMS. While I was at TMS, Alex Toth and I had adjoining offices. Sometimes after work we would go and have a couple of beers. He was a very interesting person to talk to.” Another company Niño worked for was SEGA, the video games company. There he designed what they called, ‘Playful Backgrounds.’ He also worked for Hanna-Barbera for about a year.

“I believe it was in 1986 when I started working for the Disney Studios on Treasure Island in the R&D (Research and Development) department. But that project never got off the ground. They shelved it until 1994 and then revised the whole project. We started from scratch again with the same folks from the original concept eight years earlier. It was fun meeting and seeing old faces again. This time, I was in the ‘Visual Development’ department.”

In-between those eight years Alex contributed a lot to Disney’s productions on Mulan, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Atlantis.

“One of the most earth-shaking experiences, if you’ll excuse the pun, I had was in 1991 when the volcano, Mount Pinatubo, erupted burying my house in the Philippines with tons of dust, and I mean that literally. It was so bad that I lost my house and all of the originals and books I had collected and saved all those years. I had to rebuild my house on top of the old house. And I mean that literally. Hundreds of years from now, a group of archeologist aliens from some distant planet will be digging at the site where my house once stood and will find all of my old originals and they’ll probably scratch their heads with one of their tentacles and wonder… ‘What th…??!!’.”

Nothing prepared Alex for the news he was about to hear in 2005.
On July 9 of that year, his good friend Byron Preiss was killed in East Hampton, New York, in an auto accident as he was driving to his Synagogue on Long Island to attend Shabbat services. He was only 52 years old.

“When I heard what happened that afternoon, I felt a part of me die. His death had a profound impact on me personally. Byron was more than just a friend. He was kind and generous to a fault. He was always there whenever I was in a bind. My whole family owes him so much. If I lived to be a hundred, I still wouldn’t be able to ever pay him back for his kindness, understanding, and all the help that he gave me, my wife, and my family. He was a true friend in every sense of the word. I miss him dearly and I know I’ll never find a friend like him again.”

These days Alex spends most of his time painting. “Drawing for the comics is over for me,” he says. “I enjoy painting a lot more. I find it relaxing. I paint at my own leisure. No deadlines, no endless cups of coffee to keep me awake to finish some story that’s going to be forgotten when the next issue comes out. I look forward to seeing my paintings in art galleries around the country someday. Who knows, maybe in museums one day?” he says with a wink and a smile. “But for now, I’m just happy to spread my wings and see how high I can fly.”

So, Alex Niño, who started with a dream and a stick drawing figures in the sand underneath his parents’ bamboo shack, has grown into one of the most sought after artists from the Philippines. His work is known and admired in the United States, and all the way from Europe to Japan.

Alex accepts and receives commissions for paintings from all over the country.