KAPOWWW!
Forget Batman, Spiderman, Superman. There’s a new breed of action heroes out there in the brightly hued land of comic books.
They have names like “Sonambulo” (Sleepwalker), “El Gato Negro” (the Black Cat) and “Burrito” (Little Burro).
These characters and others are being created by a small band of alternative comic book authors drawing on their Latino roots to portray the culture they grew up in, be it in Los Angeles or elsewhere.
The comic book characters celebrate Dia de los Muertos, not Halloween. The barman is a cantinador. And, from time to time, the characters speak in Spanish.
With the ranks of Latinos swelling in California, it makes sense to develop comic books geared toward that niche. But it’s not that simple.
In 1993, DC Comics, one of the top two comic book publishers in the country, established Milestone, a program to develop comic books for minority markets. The venture closed in 1997, unable to attract the numbers of readers it wanted.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a sustainable market for Latino comic books.
“I think there are Latino fans for comics that deal with issues that are specific to the Latino community, and there are some very good Latino creators,” said Chuck Rozanski, president of Mile High Comics in Denver, which owns several comic book stores in California and Colorado. “But right now it’s more publishing with passion rather than publishing with profit.”
In recent years, the comic book market has gone through a slump due to increased competition from video games, electronic toys and cable television. The industry peaked in 1993, when sales topped $1 billion for the first time ever, fueled in part by the big comic book houses coming out with new titles. DC Comics decided to kill off Superman and that issue sold between 2.5 million and 3 million copies.
But it has been a downhill slide since then for comic book sales, which have tumbled to about $550 million a year, as kids turn to PlayStation 2 and online games to keep them happy.
During the 1993 heyday, there were about 10,000 comic book stores in the country. That has dipped to about 3,000 today, according to John Miller, managing editor of Comics Buyer’s Guide. Ninety-four percent of comic book readers are men, ages 18 to 30. But there are no statistics on the ethnic breakdown of comic book readers, experts said.
The big name comic book publishers aren’t going after the niche markets, which is why cartoonists like Rafael Navarro, 33, decided to jump in with a series that carries elements of his native Mexico.
Navarro, who was born in Sonora, Mexico but grew up in Bell Gardens, cut his comic-book teeth reading “The Fantastic Four” and “Captain America.” His Spanish-speaking parents, however, encouraged him to read “Kaliman,” the Superman of Mexico, to improve his Spanish.
After years of browsing in comic book stores, the full-time animator (who recently worked on the “Rugrats” TV cartoon series) knew there were very few Latino comic characters around. So three years ago he created “Sonambulo,” a one-time masked Mexican wrestler turned private eye. Sonambulo, who wears a trench coat and a fedora, solves cases by reading people’s dreams.
Navarro, a self-publisher, printed 6,000 copies of his first Sonambulo comic book. They cost him $1 each to produce, and he sold them for $2.95. He has written and drawn two other issues, which have each sold out with runs of 3,000 copies, and he published a series of Sonambulo short stories called “Strange Tales.”
“Sonambulo came to me in a dream,” Navarro recalled. “I think it goes back to my Dad’s, cousins’ and uncles’ influence. They took me to see Mexican masked wrestlers that are so typical of our culture.”
Navarro notes that his comic books are popular in California, but also in Japan, which has traditionally been a comic book-reading culture.
“I would say it is an emerging market,” the cartoonist said. “It’s slowly but surely growing. But it is a specialized sort of thing.”
The burgeoning number of Latino comic book artists have come together to form the Professional Amigos of Comic Art Society, or PACAS, which promotes members’ works at comic book conventions and through art exhibits.
One PACAS member is Carlos Saldana, a Los Angeles native who wanted to share the richness of his Latino roots with comic book fans. Sitting in a fast-food restaurant one afternoon chowing down on a chili cheese dog, the 46-year-old artist created and sketched his comic book character “Burrito,” a time-traveling burro.
Saldana, whose full-time job is as Web master for the Los Angeles District of the U.S. Post Office, wanted to develop a funny animal character that reflected his roots.
“I draw from my past life and my surroundings,” he said. “But my first goal is to entertain.”
To publish his first issue in 1995, he spent $2,000 that had been earmarked for his five children’s Christmas gifts. The first issue sold out and he has published four more since then. But he is now looking for a company to pay the publishing costs.
For many Latino comic book creators, it’s the Hernandez brothers who provide inspiration. Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, who grew up in Oxnard and now live a mile apart in Studio City, created a successful comic book series in 1982 called “Love and Rockets.” It was published by Fantagraphics Books, a small comic book publisher in Seattle. The series, which ended in 1996 but is scheduled to start again early next year, featured a wide range of ethnic characters that live in a fictional border town called Palomar.
What distinguished the series was that the two main characters, Maggie and Hopey, are lesbians. Those and other characters are based on the crowd that the brothers ran with during the punk scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s.
“We tried to make our comic books universal, but tell it from our point of view,” explained Jaime, 41. “We didn’t like what we were seeing in the comics we were reading and we were bored with them. We thought the life we were living was much more exciting. So we just started doing comics about what we knew.”
While the Hernandez brothers have been financially successful, other Latino comic book creators struggle to break even. One ray of financial hope is to sell or license their characters to a major studio or television network to spin off into a cartoon or movie.
All the artists have agents. Saldana signed a contract with Tanglewood Family Entertainment in 1998 to market the rights to his Burrito character. However, the contract expired before anything was done.
Navarro and a partner have been in negotiations with several entertainment outlets to produce Sonambulo as a cartoon.
He has some advice for anyone thinking of starting their own comic book series: “Don’t give up your day job. It takes a while for things to get going.”
