Those who spend any time in the East Bay arts orbit already know Grey Starr—iconic front person of Pretty Frankenstein, goth auntie of Alameda and a shape-shifting creative whose output seems to multiply the moment one looks away.
One minute they’re fronting a band, the next they’re dropping albums rooted in Filipino myth. And now, in a classic Grey Starr move, they’ve collaborated on a comic book with Bryan Massie called Unggoy—and composed an accompanying soundtrack, naturally.
The project began, as many great Bay Area collaborations do, in the unlikely crucible of a break room. Starr had been carrying the seed of a comic idea for years but couldn’t find an illustrator whose enthusiasm matched their vision or budget. Then a coworker, Bryan Massie, overheard Starr spitballing concepts and volunteered to sketch a few characters. Those sketches turned into pages, those pages eventually turned into a full-blown comic.
The title Unggoy comes from the Tagalog word for “monkey,” and the story follows a family of simian vigilantes protecting their town from threats both earthly and otherworldly. Starr describes it as “borderline Ninja Turtles,” filtered through the lens of Filipino mythology, queer identity, anti-fascist resistance, and the anime and manga that helped shape their imagination. Issue one debuted a couple of months ago; issue two is well underway.
Starr brought Massie a pantheon of Filipino gods, monsters and spirits, and Massie responded with wildly detailed illustrations that pushed beyond the minimalist black-and-white manga aesthetic Starr initially imagined. The collaboration became a kind of creative call-and-response: Starr describing creatures ripped from myth—like the “manananggal,” a vampiric figure who detaches its torso to fly—and Massie returning with fever-dream versions rendered in kinetic motion.
“I’d never written a comic before,” Starr admits, noting how differently the form works compared to music or screenwriting. Every panel’s action had to be intentional. Every gesture had to be chosen. But that meticulousness, and the year-long process behind it, shaped something that feels uniquely theirs.
Massie, for his part, embellished the mythology in ways that surprised even Starr—adding visual poetry, symbolic details, and flourishes that extended the emotional and metaphysical stakes of the story. One divine character, the moon god Buwan, appears partially veiled in a halo of light—Massie’s own addition, which Starr immediately recognized as the perfect extension of the original myth.
What emerged from this collaboration is not just a comic but a community artifact. Coworkers followed its progress, cheering Starr and Massie on as pages were finished in real time.
And then there’s the soundtrack. Starr composed a six-track album—mostly in Tagalog—to accompany the comic, complete with an instrumental designed to sync atmospherically to key story beats.
“Writing a comic, for me, is something like my journeys into standup comedy or making short films,” Starr says. “These other forms were just in the ‘something I’d like to do eventually’ category until I had to try them out. I’ve wanted to make a comic—with this character and this folklore specifically—for years, and it’s so amazing to see it happening. This is really just the beginning, too.”
‘Unggoy’ is available at Oakland’s Cape & Cowl Comics and Dr. Comics & Mr. Games as well as The Experience Share and Park St. Vintage in Alameda. Likewise, the comic is available directly from the artists via Instagram—@prettyfrankensteinband or @unggoy.comic—and can be obtained in a sticker-and-soundtrack bundle at upcoming Pretty Frankenstein shows at Oakland’s Thee Stork Club on Nov. 28 and Stay Gold Deli on Dec. 13.
