Elmer is a Filipino comic book created, written, and illustrated by Gerry Alanguilan. It was originally self-published as a four-issue miniseries under a Komikero Publishing imprint between 2006 and 2008 before being collected in a trade paperback in 2009. In 2010, it was published in France by Editions Ca Et La and North America by Slave Labor Graphics. Elmer is set in a world where chickens suddenly gain human-level intelligence and the ability to speak. It focuses on one particular chicken, Jake Gallo, who is part of the second generation of intelligent chickens. When his father dies, Jake inherits a diary chronicling a struggle for equal rights that spans twenty years. It was favorably compared to George Orwell's Animal Farm and received critical acclaim for its art and seriousness. It won two awards in France and was nominated for one in North America. Publication history Production Alanguilan grew up in San Pablo, Laguna, a city in a fairly rural area of the Philippines where chickens roam freely through the streets. By the mid 1990s, he was established in the American comic industry as an inker for popular artists such as Whilce Portacio and Leinil Yu and his work had been published by DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Image Comics. He had been fascinated by chickens his whole life and had been making comic strips about them since 1997. He distributed these strips as photocopied minicomics under the title Crest Hut Butt Shop. One of the features was "Stupid Chicken Stories". In 2005, he set out to do a sequel, Ultimate Chicken Story, which he intended to be "the most hysterically ridiculous story about chickens ever written." He spent more than a year researching chickens before he began writing, and the idea became more serious as he explored it, developing into "an opportunity to tell a story that isn't really about chickens, but of humanity in general, and how we treat each other." The first draft was very different from what was eventually published because he removed parts he felt were too sensational or dramatized. In the first draft, the story was told entirely from the point of view of Elmer, an intelligent chicken who is also an actor. Influenced by David Beauchard’s Epileptic and David Mazzucchelli’s City of Glass, Alanguilan altered the story's structure to focus on Elmer's son, Jake. Alanguilan also drew on an event from his teenage years,