Comics

Latino/a author/artists have come into their own as comic book storytellers. The medium has increasingly attracted Latino/a creators since the 1980s, building into the critical mass we see today. While we see a popularity and wide generic range of Latino/a comic books today,

this has not always been the case. In Mexico and other Latin American countries, reading comic books and comic strips has been a long-accepted form of entertainment and even a potential mode of cultural and political transgression. In Mexico today, the socially and politically critical comic books of Gabriel Vargas Bernal (La Familia Burrón) and the work of Rius (Los supermachos and Los agachados) are still read by college kids and adults generally. In the US, comic books generally have had a more troubled history, mostly con-

sidered the domain of children or a childish activity. The growth of the alternative comics scene in the 1970s and 1980s as well as the successful selling of the nonserialized, longer graphic novel format in the 1990s changed this. (Notably, comic book author/artists in Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s experienced creative constraints. This led to the migration of those like Felipe Galindo (or “Feggo”), Humberto Ramos, Juan Vlasco, Francisco Haghenbeck, Ricardo García Fuentes, Edgar Clément, Sebastián Carrillo, Oscar González Loyo, among others.) It is on this wave that we see the arrival of Latino/a comics – a visual-verbal storytelling format that has the potential to challenge conventional notions of what Latino/a literature is and how to read it. For example, William Nericcio (2007: 271) writes, “without a rudimentary understanding of late 20th century comics, readers (spectators?) will be at sea reading” Junot Díaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He reminds us that in describing his protagonist Oscar Wao, Díaz’s narrator tells us that he looks like the “fat blackish kid in Beto Hernández’s Palomar” (Díaz 2007: 29). The great Latino/a fiction, as Díaz himself gestures, might be in the comic book form. This storytelling medium is especially attractive to Latino/a makers of narrative

fiction. It offers all variety of tensions and harmonies between its visual and verbal ingredients. It costs little to make. It offers the possibility of a grassroots-style distribution – web and word of mouth, for instance. It appeals to all variety of readers/viewers: young and old, Latino/a and otherwise, females and males. Its consumption can take place in short bursts and on the fly.