A Former MPL Talent Wrote This Manga About A Time-Travelling Magellan
In Ferdie, Julius “Swarley” Tabios—former MPL PH caster, professional chaos merchant, and certified isekai enjoyer—resurrects the world’s most inconvenient explorer and drops him into the present-day Philippines, where the sword is replaced by a smartphone and conquest now comes with a ring light. Ferdinand Magellan did not die in Mactan. He just logged off for a bit.
Yes, it’s a reverse isekai. Yes, Magellan becomes an influencer. Yes, it makes an uncomfortable amount of sense.
Tabios’ idea begins where Philippine history textbooks usually stop being fun: colonial trauma. But instead of solemn sepia tones and tragic violins, Ferdie chooses the sound of a YouTube intro jingle. Magellan wakes up in modern Manila and discovers what every foreigner with a vlog eventually learns: Filipinos will love you if you validate them loudly, repeatedly, and on camera.
This Magellan does not plant crosses. He plants thumbnails.
Swarley admits this whole thing started from the simplest and most dangerous of ideas: he likes isekai, and he likes history. Somewhere between those two hobbies, he noticed the now-familiar genre of the foreign content creator whose entire brand is saying “Ang sarap!” while eating street food, then harvesting validation like engagement rice. The leap from that to “What if our original colonizer did this?” is not logic. It’s instinct. The feral kind.
“I’m an isekai fan,” he says plainly, as if that explains everything—which, to be fair, it kind of does.
What makes Ferdie land isn’t just the joke (though the joke is strong), but the accuracy. Magellan as influencer is funny because it is structurally faithful. The man arrives from elsewhere, declares a mission, gains local support, and never once doubts that he is correct. The medium has changed, the arrogance hasn’t.
Summit Books editor-in-chief Lio Mangubat didn’t need much convincing. Magellan time-traveling into the age of content creators is the kind of pitch you don’t workshop—you either publish it or live with the sin of having said no. To reject it would be editorial malpractice. Or cowardice. Or both.
What follows is a brisk, happily unserious romp through familiar places—Quiapo, Enchanted Kingdom, the modern Filipino landscape refracted through the eyes of a man whose entire personality is “mission from God.”
One of the clever tricks Ferdie pulls is making Magellan… likeable. Or at least tolerable. Early drafts leaned harder into brashness, but Swarley sanded him down just enough that readers catch themselves rooting for him, then immediately feel bad about it. Someone told Lio they were annoyed because they liked Magellan. That is the exact emotional outcome this book wants.
Because the satire isn’t really about Magellan. It’s about us.
At its core, Ferdie is a PSA disguised as a manga panel: don’t trust influencers too much. Especially the ones who arrive declaring love before they understand anything. Especially the ones whose sincerity is indistinguishable from strategy.
Swarley could have chosen Rizal. He didn’t, because Rizal is familiar, safe, already embalmed in respectability. Magellan, on the other hand, operates on a grander, messier scale. Internationally legible. Historically loaded. Perfect for a story that wants to be stupid in the way satire needs to be stupid: sharp, fast, and unafraid.
This isn’t revisionist history. It’s meme history. And meme history, inconveniently, tells the truth sideways.
Ferdie doesn’t insult. It pokes. It asks what happens when colonial logic meets social media and realizes they’re basically cousins. Different outfits, same hunger.
Magellan just rebranded. And now he’s verified.
Ferdie is available on Shopee for P450.
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