Happy Garaje is the award-winning husband-and-wife duo Mark Joseph Deutsch & Johanna Velasco Deutsch, a creative studio based in Cebu City, Philippines. Mark is a designer, illustrator, and toymaker, while Johanna is an illustrator and designer. Their work spans across graphic design, illustrations, wooden sculptures, installations, exhibitions and events. Most recently, they worked on the branding as well as murals and sculptures for Solea Palm Resort in Cebu.
Which three books would you recommend?
Building Stories Chris Ware
Johanna: Reading Building Stories is quite an experience. It is like opening an old chest you find in an attic and discovering photos, journals, all sorts of bits and bobs. You can pick one object and you see a moment in a person’s life. It is not just a book. It's a big keepsake box of 14 different things, from comic books, broadsheets, a poster, a cloth-bound hardcover book, a Little Golden book to a fold-out board. The book is full of stories about people who live in the same three-storey apartment, interlocking tales that can be read in any order.
Chris Ware captured the pain and ugliness of everyday life but also the tenderness and beauty of it through objects that you can unfold, examine, and feel with your hands. It is intimate, heartbreaking, profound. You marvel at it and get overwhelmed by it. Beyond the stories, you can see all the thought, artistry and love that went into making this. And that’s something that we strive for in our work.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly CloseJonathan Safran Foer
Johanna: This book is about grief and how the bonds that we share help us in surviving that grief. It’s also about how we, as human beings, are capable of doing both terrible and wonderful things. There are two other stories, written as letters, that weave in and out of the main story. There are black and white photos and multi-colored scribbles. There is a key in a vase. There are pages with only a single word, pages with no words, and pages with words all merging together. And along with all the words is a flip-book that turns back time where a fall turns into flight.
Dandelion WineRay Bradbury
Johanna: I read this when I was much younger and I loved it then. But re-reading it recently as someone with a child of my own has given me a newfound appreciation for it. Dandelion Wine shows the ephemeral beauty of childhood summers. It reminds you of the exhilaration as a kid running at top speed, feeling alive, wanting to feel all there is to feel, wanting to remember everything, but knowing that the years will make you forget. There is magic in the seemingly mundane.
I also have to mention Taiyo Matsumoto's six-volume Sunny. It is poignant and funny, the characters are wonderfully depicted, and the art is beautiful.
The Realist Asaf Hanuka
Mark: Being a fan of autobiographical comics, I love this collected series by Asaf Hanuka. I could relate to many of the themes in the book - being an artist, a parent, trying to keep things together, and having genuine moments of joy.
El Filibusterismo José Rizal
Mark: El Filibusterismo and its prequel Noli Me Tangere were required reading for us in the Philippines. I appreciate it more now as I am older, having seen how a lot of the challenges talked about in the book resurface over time. This book showed me how power and social hierarchies can affect everyday life. I have also come to appreciate how there are many similar books like this around the world, borne out of struggle and the search for justice and identity, and that this is our own country’s gem of a book.
This Is Not My HatJon Klassen
Mark: One of my favorite picture books. It only takes 15 minutes or so to read but the art is so beautiful and the story is very funny! After I read it, it feels like I went on a wonderful 15-minute vacation for the mind.
Whose reading list are you most curious about?
Johanna: Margaret Atwood, Hayao Miyazaki, Arundhati Roy, Guillermo del Toro, Marjane Satrapi.
Mark: Wes Anderson, David Chang, Marina Abramovic, the poet Lawrence Ypil, Debbie Millman.