Pugad Baboy 33 [top] May 2026

One particularly striking two-page spread shows Polgas’s living room at night. Every electronic device is glowing: a laptop, a desktop, a television, a radio, two cellphones. But instead of communicating, each device is recording the others. The television plays a news report about a wiretapped politician, while the laptop’s webcam is covered with tape. Polgas sits in the center, holding a universal remote, but it has no batteries. The image is a perfect metaphor for the Filipino condition: surrounded by tools of connection, yet utterly isolated by the fear of being heard. Medina’s dialogue has always relied on balagtasan (verbal jousting) and deep Filipino wordplay. In Pugad Baboy 33 , language becomes a survival tactic. Characters develop a paranoid idiolect. They refuse to say the word “bomba” (bomb) directly, instead calling it “yung bagay na sumasabog na parang kapatid ni Lola Nidora” (the thing that explodes like the sibling of Lola Nidora). They discuss politics in metaphors involving lutong ulam (cooked dishes) to avoid triggering voice-recognition software.

The most hilarious and heartbreaking running gag involves a character named Gorio (the goat), who believes his landline is tapped. To outsmart the alleged listeners, he invents a fake language that is just Filipino with every consonant replaced by the letter “B.” The result is incomprehensible babble. When Polgas asks why he bothers, Gorio replies, “Bahala na si Batman sa Bonggang Bebe” —a nonsense phrase that translates to nothing. Medina’s point is devastating: in a surveillance state, the choice is between total silence or total nonsense. Sincere communication becomes impossible. The volume’s climax arrives not with a bang, but with a whimper—specifically, the whimper of a lost pet. A minor character’s parrot escapes its cage and flies around the subdivision reciting verbatim a private conversation between two politicians (fictional, but based on real transcripts). The parrot becomes a national sensation. The military is deployed to shoot the parrot. The media offers a reward for its capture. The neighbors turn on each other, accusing one another of training the bird. pugad baboy 33

In the pantheon of Philippine popular culture, few works have managed to sustain relevance, wit, and social commentary for over three decades quite like Pol Medina Jr.’s Pugad Baboy . What began in 1988 as a daily comic strip chronicling the misadventures of a rotund, sardonic everyman named Polgas has evolved into a living archive of the Filipino collective consciousness. By the time Medina released Pugad Baboy 33 (officially subtitled “Sa Kuko ng mga Agila at Ibong Mandaragit” ), the series had long shed any pretense of being mere slapstick. Instead, it presented itself as a sophisticated, often bleakly humorous mirror held up to a nation perpetually in crisis. This essay argues that Pugad Baboy 33 is not merely a collection of jokes but a masterful narrative about post-EDSA disillusionment, specifically dissecting the twin specters of state surveillance and media-driven hysteria through the lens of the absurd. It is a work that captures the moment when the Filipino dream of democratic space curdled into a paranoid hangover. The Historical Context: From People Power to Digital Panic To fully appreciate Pugad Baboy 33 , one must situate it within the specific historical humidity of its creation. The early 2000s to mid-2010s in the Philippines were characterized by a volatile cocktail: the aftermath of the EDSA II ouster of President Estrada, the glitchy rise of internet cafes, and the increasing weaponization of media for political ends. While Medina never explicitly dates the volume, internal clues—references to wiretapping, “Hello Garci” style scandals, and the proliferation of cheap spy cameras—place its thematic core in the era of the Arroyo administration’s legitimacy crisis. The television plays a news report about a

The volume is not a call to revolution. It is not a manual for digital hygiene. It is a survival guide for the soul. Pol Medina Jr. offers no solution to the problem of the surveillance state. Instead, he offers a posture: ironic detachment, small acts of defiance, and the preservation of a private, absurd inner world. Pugad Baboy 33 is essential reading because it captures the moment when Filipinos realized that the eagles and birds of prey are not coming from outside—they are the neighbors next door, the voices on the radio, and the reflection in the mirror. In the face of such total exposure, the only radical act left is to keep one secret, no matter how small. For Polgas, that secret is a talking parrot. For the Filipino reader, that secret is the last untapped corner of their own mind. Medina’s genius is making us laugh while reminding us that laughter is the most private thing we still own. Medina’s dialogue has always relied on balagtasan (verbal

In this brilliant narrative stroke, Medina reveals the true “birds of prey.” They are not the government agents or the shady informants. They are the citizens themselves, who, given the chance, will cannibalize their community for a moment of clarity or a minute of fame. The real eagle’s claws are the hands of the neighbors pointing fingers. Polgas solves the mystery not by heroism, but by accident: he leaves a bag of chicharon (pork rinds) on his balcony, the parrot lands, and he covers it with a laundry basket. But instead of turning the parrot over, he teaches it a new phrase: “Wala akong pakialam” (I don’t care). Then he sets it free. Pugad Baboy 33 ends on a deceptively quiet note. Polgas is back in his favorite sako (beanbag chair), drinking a warm beer, watching the news report about the “terrorist parrot” that was never found. Sharmaine asks him if he feels guilty. He replies, “Sa dami ng nagmamatyag sa atin, sa wakas, may isang bagay na hindi nila nakita.” (With all the people watching us, finally, there’s one thing they didn’t see.)