THE comic book that tells the story behind the Pogoy hostage taking of Australian Jaqueline Hamill and 14 others in Davao City prison in 1989, titled “Digong: Ang Mga Kanlungan ng mga Inaapi at Inaabuso (Digong: Protector of the Oppressed and the Abused),” includes:

-- Scenes showing how Rodrigo Duterte, then on his first term as city mayor, volunteered to become a hostage so that the victims snatched by the group of convicts led by Felipe Pugoy in an escape attempt from the Davao Penal Colony could be freed;

-- Months later, after Pugoy was persuaded to go to jail, the second hostage taking at Camp Leonor, the Metrodiscom jail, and the stand-off there,

-- The gang-rape and killing of the female prayer warrior of the Joyful Assembly of God.

But the comic book doesn’t show Digong saying, after seeing the woman missionary’s body, what he said then, as he admitted in an April 12 campaign rally: “T***a, sayang ito. Ang napasok sa isip ko, ni-rape nila. Pinagpilahan nila. Nagalit ako kasi ni-rape. Oo isa rin yun. Napakaganda. Dapat ang mayor muna ang mauna.”

The comic book must have been printed before the controversy over his rally remarks erupted. It would’ve been interesting to see in sketches how Digong justified his behavior, for which he has refused to apologize.

No curses from Digong. Instead when he got the call informing him that all the hostages were killed, including a boy, and the women slain after they were raped. A balloonattributed to him the thought, “D-Biyos ko pong mahabagin.” No “p....g ina, mo!”

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Artist did Mar’s comics

The comic book was written by KC Cordero and JM Estrabela and, note, drawn by Karl Comendador, the same artist who did “Sa Gitna ng Unos,” the controversial comic book that tells about Mar Roxas’s exploits during the Yolanda storm in Leyte.

Just as he did for Roxas in the “Unos” comic book, Comendador depicted Digong as a hero who showed his courage and self-sacrifice by trading himself as hostage for the release of the victims in the Davao Penal Colony incident and, months later, leading the massacre of thecriminals in the city prison in the second incident after the hostages were all killed.

Real stories embellished by fiction, in which heroes are magnified into super-heroes and the candidates for president depicted in nothing less than glorious light.

[bzzzzz@sunstar.com.ph or paseares@gmail.com]