By Arturo Conde -
NBC News
The first issue of a new Marvel series seeks to focus on the powerful, rich and motivating stories of a diverse cast of Latino superheroes who have long been ignored.
"This book is a door through which you can find your way to all the comics that have been
building stories around the Latino community
," said Frederick Luis Aldama, author and comics scholar, about the first print and digital issue from
Marvel's Voices: Communities
, which went on sale Wednesday.
Communities
brings together a set of Latino heroes created by community writers and artists.
Although some Latino superheroes have been part of the Marvel universe for decades, without continuity, many of them have been overlooked, according to Aldama, director of the Latin X Pop Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, and who is also known for his award-winning book
Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics.
The stories were written by Latino screenwriters.
Capture via NBC News
"I personally know that there is an abundance of Latino superheroes because I have read comics," said Aldama, author of the
Communities
foreword
, "
but the Marvel encyclopedia doesn't even mention them, so there is a story that has been willfully ignored. Or
is it a story that we must tell
".
One of the Latino characters that appears in the first issue of
Communities
is Ghost Rider, a mechanics student who becomes a superhero and drives a large car with his skull on fire.
Karla Pachecho, the Native American and Latino writer who created this one-page story of the demonic superhero, says she wanted to base her comic on a personal anecdote of
how her father taught her to make tortillas.
"It's a short story about growing up and learning to do something," Pacheco said, "it's about remembering that you didn't need to use measuring cups because your cupped hand can be a measuring cup for flour, and with your fingers you take the exact amount of salt, and that you can quickly turn the tortilla out of the cast iron skillet without a spatula, because you're not afraid of fire. "
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For Pacheco, linking her personal story to a Latino superhero is a significant advance, because many diverse characters, according to her, have not been written by people of color before.
For Juan Ponce, a Mexican screenwriter for Marvel, who wrote
a story
in
Communities
about
a 1950 Brazilian sorceress named Nina,
discovering a character like Superman, who came from another planet and was adopted by a new family, was enough to make something resonate. with his own immigrant story.
"Obviously, he was a white man, but he was an
alien.
And his values and his family really spoke to me.
I never saw Superman different than my dad
," Ponce said.
He added: "They were both men who had grown up on a farm and had done everything to do the right thing for their families. And that was the moment when I wanted to write stories about someone like me and put my values on the page."
Terry Blas, a Mexican-American artist who wrote a story about a young magician named Eva (she is also a cousin of Reptil, a superhero who can transform into a dinosaur), was motivated to write stories to share with readers with common values.
[A new Marvel comic focuses on capeless heroes battling the pandemic]
"I wanted to do something for someone who could feel the way I did when I was younger, and so they would
n't have to search far to see themselves reflected in a book,
" he said.
But Blas also wanted to give visibility to others who are still underrepresented.
"Part of the motivation for creating the character of Eva was that one of the fastest growing demographic groups in the United States is college-educated Latinas. And it is important to help that representation," he said.
Other Latino creators say they struggle to bring more diversity to mainstream media because different racial and ethnic groups are constantly being reduced to simplified stories.
"I think the idea of a single story is something that affects all groups in the country," said Julio Anta, a Cuban-Colombian writer for Marvel.
[Spider-Man and other Marvel characters arrive at Disney parks]
"
The Latinx community comes from so many different places.
And they have so many different stories that they are not limited to being undocumented immigrants or building a life from scratch. I think we are still seen in a certain way, that many times on the screen it is a cartoon "he added.
Anta wrote a story whose characters are Miles Morales (a spider man) and Anya Corazón (a spider woman).
They both argue about the term
Latinx
and what it means to identify as such.
In this sense,
Communities
offers insight into the conversations some Hispanic families are having and how language changes and evolves from generation to generation.
Different types of Hispanic people
"Our job as storytellers is to represent the world we live in. The mass media, as a whole, has failed in that," said Daniel José Older, a Marvel screenwriter, who is Cuban and Jewish.
"It's really about telling our truth, not having a political agenda. The world is very diverse. There are different groups. And different types of
Latinx
people
," he added.
Older wrote a story about White Tiger, whom he describes as
an ordinary Puerto Rican man who lives in Harlem
and, surprisingly, acquired superpowers in 1970.
[Only 2% of Latinos identify as 'Latinx'. Some of them are offended by the term]
For some Latino creators, this quality of superheroes of being ordinary and extraordinary is what makes them connect with people.
"
Heroes are born wherever,
" said Enid Balám, a Mexican comic book artist who worked on the story of Anta and on the miniseries Reptil written by Blas.
Using Reptil as an example, Balám said: "What makes him a superhero is not only his strength, but his ability and his will to be there for others."
