What is the formula of making a good comic book? Well, the formula written above might be it. Try it if you like. See if it works. The formula also reveals how I, along with Arnold Arre, Brandie Tan, Mark Gatela, Bow Guerrero, and J.B. "Taps" Tapia, created BATCH72. Some months after we published COMICS 101 I approached my uncle who published Tagalog romance books. He said that we would sell more copies if we wrote our stories in Filipino. At first, the guys were not so hot about the idea. Honestly, I wasn't too excited about it either since writing in Filipino is not my forte. It took some time before I could get the guys to sit down and seriously think about this project. It was around December 1994 when our friend Mona lent us a videotape of Color It Red. Arnold borrowed the tape and watched it until the video player spat it out. He fell in love with Cooky Chua. The next time we got together he started doodling this character who looked like Cooky. He said he wanted to do a comic book about her. I told him he was obsessed. This obsession was only amplified when Color It Red's first album "Hand Painted Sky" was released. (Let me clarify that Arnold is not really maniacally-obsessed with Cooky. Honest) When I finally got the guys together for a meeting, Taps had just finished reading the history of the Valiant Universe. He was so hyped up by the concept he insisted that we also create a shared-universe. In one night, we created four titles which consisted of a super-hero book, a big-guns-police-action-book, a magic-horror book, and a space-opera-book. When it came around to making the fifth book Taps suggested that it would be about an ordinary "barkada" that incidentally had super-powers. Arnold immediately presented his Cooky-character to be part of the group. Since she looked like Cooky, it was suggested that the "barkada" should be a band. Soon enough, everyone created a character that became part of the band. And on the seventh hour, we rested. We looked at our work and said it was good. The more we looked at our creations, the more we fell in love with BATCH 72. BATCH 72 really came together when Arnold left for Germany in June 1995 for a vacation. He insisted that he could do work while he was there. I rushed a script and gave it to him a day before he left. I wasn't sure that he could do work and enjoy his vacation at the same time. I'm glad Arnold proved me wrong. A month later I received the first 24 pages of BATCH7 2 through the mail. I was blown away by Arnold's art. What do YOU think? Well, here we are at the end of the story... or is it the beginning? Tell us what you think? Please write to us and tell us how much you love us. (hahaha) We have a lot of plans for this book. Hope you stick around and join our barkada.