Arriola’s ‘Pelikulang Komiks’ receives NAST Outstanding Book/Monograph award

The National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) recognized Prof. Joyce L. Arriola, Ph.D., for her book “Pelikulang Komiks: Toward a Theory of Filipino Film Adaptation.” She received the 2021 Outstanding Book/Monograph Award on June 1, 2021.


NAST presents this award annually for books and/or monographs published by Filipino publishers and authors based in the Philippines within five years preceding the award.


“Pelikulang Komiks” tackles a proposed/emergent Filipino komiks-to-film adaptation theory based on archival texts from the 1950s. An inventory of extant texts led to the selection of the identification of twelve cases of komiks-to-film adaptations, representing Filipinized genres such as the korido film; fantasy/ folklore, family drama, woman’s film, personality comedy, and historical film. Contemporary adaptation criticism was also employed to explain constructs specific to Filipino narrative culture. Moreover, a social film history based on unstructured interviews with ten key informants provided the context to the texts analyzed. This was supplemented by periodicals published in the fifties.


Arriola was a recipient of the 2018 Achievement Award in the Humanities by the National Research Council of the Philippines and won the National Book Award for Film/Film Criticism in 2007 for the book titled “Postmodern Filming of Literature: Sources, Contexts, and Adaptations.” She is a professor of literature and communication at the University of Santo Tomas, where she was the Director of the UST Research Center for Culture, Arts, and Humanities from January 2017 to December 2019.


Published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2019, Pelikulang Komiks can be found at their online store: https://press.up.edu.ph/store/books/view_item/736

Like this article?

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter