Pugad Baboy 33 May 2026

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.

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.) pugad baboy 33

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