A few years later, Niño got his first shot at working for American comics. And, with the growing evidence of a more artistically and financially lucrative career in that direction, he started drifting away from the local comics.

The man responsible for launching Niño's career in the US was Tony De Zuñiga, who, after a successful stint abroad, came home to the Philippines with his American wife in 1971. The visit was purely business. Zuñiga had interested his employers at DC about the country's reservoir or comics talent that they sent him over to scout around for illustrators and bring back samples of their works. Niño's work was among those approved together with the works of Nestor Redondo and Alfredo Alcala. Fan letters which poured into the DC office were all praises for the new discoveries.

Alex Niño's passport into the US comics scene in 1971 was a full color illustration of a script for the DC National Periodicals. The tale entitled, To Die For Magda, a 10-page story about witchcraft and sorcery by Carl Wessler, "dared enter" the House of Mystery in its 204th issue. What followed was the frequent feature of his works in HOM and other DC comics magazine titles such as House of Secrets, Witching Hour, Unexpected, Weird Mystery, Weird, and Ghost. He also did the back-up story in Rima: The Jungle Girl.

As Niño's interest in local comics waned and his contribution to DC stabilized, offers of commissioned works came in from other US publishers who had taken notice of his exceptional - and to some, sensational - talent. Foremost was retired cartoonist Vincent Fago of the Pendulum Press whose Time Machine, Moby Dick and Three Musketeers in illustrated pocket book editions for children showcased Niño's talent. The books average 60 pages. Of note too was an inking job for Russ Manning on Tarzan of the Apes.

However, Niño's discovery of his artistic self was - as true for many artists in any field - a stubborn, lonely fight all the way. He grew up in a family whch held a comics illustrator's profession in low regard. Thus, his meddling with his photographer father's air brush, his copying of illustrations in comic magazines and his crude drawings on walls were dismissed as nothing but childish curiosity rather than tentative gropings of a potential artistic personality. His parents wanted a doctor in the family and that was that. He was sent to Manila to take up medicine.

As luck would have it, the stay in Manila turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It brought him in touch with various comics publications and, before long, he was apprenticing for Jess Jodloman, the creator of a viking-type character, Ramir.

"I learned a lot of techniques from Mang Jess," Niño said. "Composition, lay-outing, pencilling, inking - the basics. Before I met him at Bulaklak Publications, I was at a loss for the right formula to break into comics." One can surmise that Jodloman was also instrumental in his first break into comics in November 1959, when Cristino Mata, the editor of Bulaklak Magasin, gave him a four-page script of a story about a katipunero hero.

There were other influences during that early stage of searching for a style. Niño studied and borrowed the action and characters from Francisco Coching, the etching techniques of Alfredo Alcala, angling and composition from the action drawings of Ruben Yandoc, and refinement in execution from Nestor Redondo.

Niño has also incorporated some of what he learned from his post high school exposure to photography in his father's studio in Tarlac. "For two years before I took up medicine, I acted as my father's assistant in covering graduations, weddings, birthdays and the like," he said. Bored as he might be with photography, it has given him valuable pointers in lighting and composition that he soon translated into the illustrated page. Up to now, he employs the air brush to control the application of color in his drawings.

Eclecticism describes Niño's art. Change and growth characterize it, as a survey of his works from 1959 to the present would show. He is an artist forever experimenting with various styles. No matter how original a style used for the work at hand might be, he refuses to sit content but would introduce nuances to the next. The artist evokes the picture of a man playing a game with himself, triumphant with every moment of outdoing himself. The same picture shows too, an artist refusing to fall into a rut, ever aiming to mature in his relentless search for perfection.

Jodloman, who has seen the transistion in Niño's works from 1959 to the mid-60's, notes the latter's lust for experiment. Niño never draws a frame twice but deletes any repetition of either human figure or scene lay-out previously executed. Something new would invariably appear in each of his works. When he saw Alfredo Alcala's etching of Voltar in 1963, he exprimented with the eye-straining technique. He also went into serious cartooning in a style where human and animal forms were distorted and exaggerated for intended effect against a contrastingly realistic background. Turning to color illustration, he tried marker pens but gave up because of the medium's unstableness.

"Although lacking in detail, it had a personality truly his," Jodloman said of Niño's early effort. "After browsing on several references, he would position himself before a drawing board and, with all the ideas lifted from the references, would draw what he had seen but would fashion them the way it suited him." The mentor shed light on the decorative element in Niño's art. "Niño was always in a hurry to ink his pencillings. He filled in at the inking stage the shadings and decorative details on the subjects and backgrounds." The result could be austere, profusely decorative or something in between, depending on the artist's mood at the moment.

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