User:Katukomal/Garapitik

Garapitik is a fictional character created by Erik Katukomal as the main hero/protagonist in its non-profit self-titled comics published (in web) during the year 2003. He is a parody of the popular Marvel Comics superhero/franchise Spider-man. Having been based on the said character, Garapitik also possessed the same set of super powers, which are superhuman strength, agility, spider-sense and webbing (but in Garapitik's case, his web comes from his butt). Garapitik was first published in web as a short animation and later on a two-episode web comics.

'''

Production and Publication
''' Around late 2003 (ca. November to December of that year), Erik Katukomal began sketching the comical character, that was later on named after a popular breed of spider in the Philippines —-Garapitik. Visually, Garapitik was a distorted image of Spider-man. Whereas the latter resembled realistic proportions of human anatomy, the former was more cartoon in style. His head was almost the size of his body (this detail was also used in the comic as part of its joke) while his arms and legs were designed thin, muscle-less and rubber-like in appearance. The very idea of the character's existence was to create a humorous take or a parody of the first installment of the popular comic book-turned-movie Spider-man, without the intention to ridicule much more for the intention to promote humor. Katukomal produced a Flash animation featuring Garapitik versus Green Gulay, a spoof of Green Goblin from the same movie and franchise. In the same year, the said Flash animation was uploaded to Deviantart, a web site that hosted works of different artists around the world for free, under the account katukomal.deviantart.com. The short animation was accessible in the said website for several years, until its creator decided to delete it in an attempt to relaunch his account for a newer batch of artworks in May of 2010.

After the web-publication of the said animation, Katukomal continued the storyline of Garapitik but this time, in the form of comics. It featured Doctor Okpusit as the main villain, the spoof of Doctor Octopus —-one of Spider-man's long-time foes in the comic franchise and the second movie's main antagonist. The comics was a 34-paged parody of the movie Spider-man 2, which was split into two parts to make it issues number 4 and 5. The comics was first uploaded in August of 2005 in Agimat.net, a website that featured Philippine-based independent comics and artists.

In February 26, 2011, the comics Garapitik was re-uploaded by its author in his own blog, Pilosopotassium (pilosopotassium.blogspot.com) a blog dedicated for comics and art in popular media. In this same blog, another Mang Ben Kyomiks (parody for the Marvel Comics Universe) character was posted, Bakaltos (known in its English version as Ironmac) an armored comical adventurer, a spoof of Ironman.

'''

Author Inconsistency
 In the cover of the Garapitik comics, the name of the author was Jerk Pingol''' (read "Art & Plot by Jerk Pingol") and the name Katukomal was indicated as the producing body or group (read "Katukomal Productions"). But the recent upload in Pilosopotassium blog, the comics was attributed to the author of the said web log, who was stated as Erik Katukomal. Such inconsistent attribution might create confusion, that's why in the last part of the Garapitik post in Pilosopotassium, Erik Katukomal wrote that he was also known as Jerk Pingol. In fact, the real name of the author is Jerking Pingol. He was nicknamed as "Jerk" and have recently used the pen name Erik Katukomal in most of his works in popular media.