THE URBAN CIVIC LANDSCAPE in Western Canada is the setting for the English-Filipino bilingual comic-strip 'Bodjie', its particular geography quite close to the very heart of North America.

Its main characters are Filipino-Canadians who've been friends for more than a decade, each with their own 'somewhat unique' stories to share. Such is the premise and essence of the strip as a whole, perhaps.

. . .

Bodjie was created in late-2019 (written, translated, penciled, lettered, and inked) by Gilbert Trillana, a cartoonist residing in Manitoba, Canada, for two decades.  Born and raised in the Philippines, Gilbert moved to North America to further his career in Graphic Arts, despite a pre-Med background and some training in both Music and Illustration.  

It is his shared experiences living amongst Canadians and Filipinos for years that inspired him to develop his very own comic-strip.

To this end, it compelled Gilbert from the very start to make the strip visually-bilingual by using English and/or Filipino subtitles, an element quite rarely, if not ever, employed in comics.  **Inspired by Canada's history of English-French bilingual use, it's this uniquely-Canadian way of conveying art and satire based on personal experiences amongst people from all walks of life that gave the cartoonist enough valuable incentive to maintain his form of self-expression to those interested not just with comics in general, but with Bodjie's visual narrative simultaneously expressed in-between somewhat distinct geographic and cultural norms.

. . .

**Hoooooooooly crap, was that EVER a mouthful.
(Run-on sentences are kinda like my thing) -- G.T.