Miel Prudencio Ma
also known as Miel or Dengcoy Miel
is an award-winning illustrator and editorial cartoonist for various news agencies both local and foreign for four decades now. Miel has a master's degree in design from the University of South Wales (Sydney). He was previously an editorial cartoonist for the now-defunct “Philippine Daily Express” owned by Ferdinand Marcos, later becoming chief editorial cartoonist for “The Philippine Star,” a newspaper founded in 1986 after Marcos. In 1992, he immigrated to Singapore with his family. Miel began his career in Singapore as assistant arts editor of “The Straits Times”, Singapore's leading English daily. Miel's work has been published by United Feature Syndicate WittyWorld since 1986, and most recently by The New York Times Syndicate (NYTS), Cartoonists and Writers Syndicate (CWS). The cartoons of him can also be found on Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index website. His works have been published in newspapers such as “The International Herald Tribune”, “Newsweek”, “Asiaweek”, “World & I”, “Japan Times”, “The New York Times”, “The Washington Post”, “The South China Morning Post” and “World Press Review”, among others. Also, he received the Newspaper Illustration Award from the National Cartoon Society in 2001.
"The principal message of my art is a nature of possibilities. If I could imagine the themes and subjects of my art, then I could articulate them on the canvas. The materiality of all these invisible concepts, like anger, lust, greed, and longing, has to somehow be distilled on my canvases. That’s what I’m trying to do in a style and manner that is my own, just as my predecessors did on their own."
Photographed By Joel H. Garcia for The Philippines Yearbook 2023
The Filipino National Identity Edition