I WAS a member of the Stamp Advisory Committee (SAC) of the Philippine Postal Corp. for many years, and the chairman of the designing subcommittee ?til 2005.

Together with Philatelic expert Dr. Ngo Tiong Tak, chairman of SAC, we instituted the National Stamp Collecting Month dedicated to the arts in 1994. We titled the issues ?Great Achievers in Philippine Art.?

Naturally, the artworks chosen for the stamps were from artists who were achievers. National Artists were given preference.

An important Philatelic policy and one of the guidelines that I insisted upon was that only artworks in public collections can be featured on the stamps, or an artwork donated to the Philatelic Museum.

The comics of Carlos J. Caparas were included in this art issue in November 2008. But Dr. Ngo (now vice-chair of SAC) removed the label ?Great Achievers in Philippine Art? from the design of the stamps, as he could not find evidence of Caparas being a great achiever.

The Philatelic Bulletin stated misleadingly that the ?designs/komiks illustrations [were] by Carlos J. Caparas,? when it was public knowledge that the illustrations were farmed out.

Dr. Ngo was unable to discover who gave Caparas the title of ?Pinoy Komiks King.? If you ask any artist in the Philippines, it would be Francisco Coching or Larry Alcala who would be seen as deserving of such a title. They authored and illustrated their komiks and are highly popular.