Mapping Latinx Creative Labor Across the Comic Book Industry
Variant covers for Hispanic Heritage Month (DC Comics, September – October 2022), left to right: Titans United: Bloodpact #1 by Jorge Molina, Young Justice: Targets #3 by Dan Mora, Multiversity: Teen Justice by Vanesa Del Rey.
In the United States, the medium of comics goes hand-in-hand with the genre of superheroes to the point that people frequently conflate the two¹. Considering that 2023 was a watershed year for Latinx superhero media in film, with both Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Blue Beetle releasing during the summer, it is logical to wonder if the comic book source material these movies derive from are enjoying a similar degree of success or whether the films are somehow a translation of the comics’ own achievements. And if they are, does this indicate a platform where Latinx cultural producers have gained the ability to depict representations of their design?
A great deal of scholarship exists on Latinx comics, but the vast majority of this focuses on cultural analysis of textual artifacts rather than the examination of production processes within the structures of the industry and tends to center independent publishing tied to (auto)biographical work and political cartooning rather than mainstream commercial work².
The scholarly work most inclined to address mainstream industry texts includes the prolific oeuvre of Frederick L. Aldama, such as Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez (2009), Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle (2011), Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future (2016), Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics (2017), and Tales from la Vida: A Latinx Comics Anthology (2018). While an important entry point into Latinx cultural creativity within a narrow and specific media industry, this existing scholarship heavily focuses on the media form’s politics of representation rather than its politics of production³, or the relationship that exists with consumers through distribution and reception. My intent is to rectify this gap in the scholarship through an ethnographic approach to the study of cultural production within the comic book industry and the role of Latinx creators in these spaces, as well as their relation to the symbols of representation crafted and disseminated through mainstream superhero comics in the United States and the recursive feedback loop that forms between comic book producers and audiences.
The reality is that the success of characters like Miles Morales and Jaime Reyes has occurred despite the lack of involvement from Latinx cultural producers within the industry. The comic book industry in the United States is an oligopolist⁴ media heterotopia⁵ that disaggregates production in an inherently collaborative method and then obfuscates the individual labor of each producer through a process of reintegration that actively seeks seamlessness. A single comic book being produced may have the following stark division of labor: a story developer, a script writer, a penciller, an inker, a colorist, a letterer, a cover artist, an assistant editor, and an editor, all under the purview of the publisher’s editor-in-chief. The seamless heterotopic reaggregation process and discourse of creative collaboration would have a consumer believe all individual positions within this workflow pipeline received equal treatment, but editors and cultural producers mostly involved with the writing aspect of the craft (story and script development) were the storytelling decision-making powers. And it is precisely these positions that Latinx cultural producers within the mainstream comic book industry in the United States have historically found themselves unable to access.
The argument has been made that the comic book industry in the United States rests on the backs of Latinx and Jewish media makers from its inception, and this is not wrong. The industry’s beginnings tie back to World War II, primarily by encouraging readers to support the idea of having the United States join the war with stories that presented Nazis as prominent villains, and once the U.S. joined the war, by supporting the troops through selling war bond advertisements in printed comics. The owners of these publishing companies, the editors who determined which stories would see print, and a great deal of the writers who penned these stories were Jewish immigrants or the children of such. Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, a white man from the Southern United States, and Jack S. Liebowitz, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, formed DC Comics’ predecessor, Detective Comics, Inc., in 1937; meanwhile, in 1939, Martin Goodman, the son of Jewish immigrants to the United States⁶, founded Timely Comics, which would eventually become Marvel Comics. For Latinx laborers, however, the work available was, and continues to be, usually in the illustration aspect of the creative process, rather than in editorial or writing positions with access to decision-making power in the media production process⁷. Today this means less access to storytelling authority, therefore producing characters representing specific communities that are made by those outside of the represented community.
Cover of Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man Ultimate Collection (Marvel Comics, July 2015) by Sara Pichelli.
Marvel Comics’ Miles Morales, a Spider-Man raised in Brooklyn with an African-American father and Puerto Rican mother, debuted in 2011.⁸ Writer Brian Michael Bendis and illustrator Sara Pichelli created the character. The first time an Afro-Latinx cultural producer wrote Miles was when Vita Ayala, an Afro-Puerto Rican writer from New York City, included him as a guest star during their two-issue guest-writing stint on the 2019 Shuri series⁹, regularly written by Africanfuturist¹⁰ novelist Nnedi Okorafor. During a book signing event in Brooklyn in 2019, I asked Ayala about their experience writing the character of Miles Morales, and they expressed their dismay at the idea that they were the first person to share Miles’ lived experience to ever write the character. It took eight years after the introduction of Miles’ character for this to happen. The first time an Afro-Latinx person wrote Miles Morales was for a guest slot in a different book––not even Miles’ own series. Further, this exclusion would be a preview of things to come: Miles Morales’ solo series has been ongoing since Ayala wrote him back in 2019, but a Latinx writer has never helmed any of these series.
DC Comics’ Jaime Reyes has fared a little better than Miles Morales. Known as Blue Beetle, the Mexican-American Jaime Reyes debuted in 2006¹¹ during one of DC’s well-known crossover events weaving a story through their entire line of comics. Writers Keith Giffen and John Rogers and illustrator Cully Hamner created Jaime. Despite various ongoing solo series plus appearances in several team books such as Justice League and Teen Titans, a Latinx creative did not write Jaime until 2023’s six-issue limited series Blue Beetle: Graduation Day. Written by Mexican-American Josh Trujillo and illustrated by Adrián Gutiérrez, the limited series came out in both English and Spanish, a first for a mainstream comics publisher in the United States. The success of Graduation Day led DC Comics to promote the same creative team of Trujillo and Gutiérrez to helm a new Blue Beetle ongoing solo series, which began its run this September. This new series features Jaime Reyes moving from his traditional setting of El Paso, Texas, to the fictional Palmera City, as seen in the Blue Beetle film directed by Ángel Manuel Soto and starring Xolo Maridueña. It’s an interesting choice to go from a real-life majority Latinx border city to a fictional one. But the shift might be a sign of corporate synergy to maintain consistency across the movie and comic books. Whatever the reasons, the end result indicates a different treatment between DC’s premier Latinx character (Jaime) versus Marvel’s (Miles). In DC’s case, cultural producers with similar lived experiences as the character have been given access to storytelling decision-making power in an official ongoing solo series.While DC Comics and Marvel Comics have different approaches to connecting their most recognizable Latinx characters to cultural producers with similar lived experiences in a way that suggests one is more conscientious than the other, the reality is more complicated, and as in any capitalist enterprise, driven by profit.
One of these ill-conceived decisions was DC’s marketing campaign for Hispanic Heritage Month in 2022. To celebrate the occasion, the company decided to publish several of its ongoing comics with special variant covers, showcasing some of its most well-known Latinx characters. However, the covers themselves caused considerable fan backlash when readers learned that DC showcased Latinx characters with cultural food items. Many Latinx fans explained they felt they were being reduced to street food in parallel to how their culture was being offered for consumption.
Cover of Marvel Voices: Comunidades #1 (Marvel Comics, December 2021) by Joe Quesada.
Comics writer Edgardo Miranda-Rodríguez, who produces independent comics through his own studio¹², argued that DC’s Hispanic Heritage Month covers were “incredibly tone-deaf — almost like a parody of our culture when we're reduced down to food, you know? And [...] street food, it's very, very codified for me. But it also speaks to how unaware they are that this is coded, that this is offensive, that it is tasteless. And it feels very exhausting.”
Meanwhile, Marvel Comics’ engagement with Hispanic Heritage Month has been to make it part of its Marvel Voices campaign. The Marvel Voices initiative, beginning in 2020, is a yearly series showcasing characters of specific identities and creative teams of similar lived experiences¹³ with Marvel Voices: Community/Comunidades being the Latinx variant of this campaign. Presented as either an individual book that comes out during a heritage recognition month or a series of stories added to the latter half of a more recognizable series published by the company, such as Avengers and X-Men, the Marvel Voices initiative serves as a clear marketing strategy.
It is also often the first step for cultural producers of marginalized communities to get into the industry. In a panel at a 2023 comics convention in New York City, Marvel writer Anthony Oliveira, who got his start through the Marvel Voices project, warned a cynical audience against seeing the initiative solely as a gimmick, calling it a platform for the publisher to hold auditions for writers and illustrators, especially those of underserved and underrepresented communities.
Since its beginnings in the early 20th century, the mainstream comic book industry in the United States has its origins in the invisibilized labor of marginalized and otherized cultural producers, particularly the undervalued labor of Latinx creators. This practice set the tone for the industry at large; even with some incremental advances today, Latinx cultural producers in comics still do not have access to decision-making positions in this storytelling endeavor.
A blueprint for change is possible if the industry adopts a different view: Perhaps DC Comics recruits a creative team that shares the lived experience of its most widely recognized Latinx character to helm an ongoing solo series published both in English and Spanish, while Marvel Comics regularly holds auditions for creators of underrepresented communities through its Marvel Voices initiative. A combination of these practices would allow for more Latinx cultural producers to gain access to storytelling decision-making power to take control of the images being produced about their communities and enact a form of self-representation that is rarely afforded to anyone but white men in superhero comics.
¹ U.S. government censorship during the mid-20th century caused comics publishing companies to abandon most other genres and focus on superheroes.
² See the graphic works of Lalo Alcaraz or Jaime Hernandez, or dissertations such as Jennifer Maldonado Caroccio’s Latinx Comix: Graphic Memoirs and Comic Biographies as Counter History (2020) and Anthony R. Ramirez’s Historias De La Frontera: Using Critical Latinx Border Cultural Studies Theory to Explore the Latinx Identity of the US-Mexico Border in Comic Books (2022).
³ Saha, Anamik. Race and the Cultural Industries. John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
⁴ The mainstream U.S. comic book industry is under the control of “The Big Two”, DC Comics and Marvel Comics, who jointly corner 80% of the market.
⁵ Chung, Hye Jean. Media Heterotopias: Digital Effects and Material Labor in Global Film Production. Duke University Press, 2018.
⁶ Vaz, Mark Cotta. Empire of the Superheroes: America’s Comic Book Creators and the Making of a Billion-Dollar Industry. University of Texas Press, 2021.
⁷ Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. University of Arizona Press, 2017.
⁸Ultimate Fallout #4, Marvel Comics, 2011.
⁹Shuri Vol. 1, #6 and #7, Marvel Comics, 2019.
¹⁰ Okorafor herself refuses the appellation “Afrofuturist” and has coined the term “Africanfuturist.”
¹¹ Infinite Crisis #3, DC Comics, 2006.
¹² Miranda-Rodríguez worked for both DC and Marvel at different points in his life but left due to the constraints he felt were being placed upon him and his desire to represent his own lived experience as a Latinx cultural producer.
¹³The Marvel Voices initiative also includes Marvel Voices: Legacy (Black characters and creators), Marvel Voices: Identity (Asian/Asian-American/Pacific Islander characters and creators), Marvel Voices: Heritage (Indigenous characters and creators) and Marvel Voices: Pride (Queer characters and creators).
Andrés Olán Vázquez is a doctoral candidate in New York University's Anthropology Department. His work focuses on Latinx cultural producers in the mainstream U.S. comic book industry, as well as the independent comics scene in his native Puerto Rico.