Dead Man Talking: Javier Hernandez at the Blanton

Blanton announcement for Javier Hernandez, featured artist in There Goes My Hero: Comics and Luchadores.

Claudia Zapata, Associate Curator of Latino Art, introduces the afternoon.

Claudia Zapata, the Blanton's Associate Curator of Latino Art and the first ever to hold that position at the museum, does the honors of the introduction. Javier Hernandez settles into the armchair with a mic and opens with the news that he'd caught the new Spider-Man movie that morning, five hours to kill before the talk. A working cartoonist then walks a full house through fifty years in the field.

He stops early to restate a case he clearly still has to make, even to an audience that filled a Blanton auditorium to hear him: reading comics is reading, because you're reading "the pictures and the dialogue captions." He dates the practice back to Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesoamerican glyphs. Comics are ancient. The balloon and the gutter are the recent story technologies.

The Brown-optic takes shape

Slide by slide, Javier rebuilds his creator odyssey, showing how a bicultural kid in Whittier scavenged a la rasquache a Latino principia aestetica from whatever the culture left lying around. It amounts to autoethnography, though he never calls it that.

Javi's Pop Cultura Education

Lucha libre comes first. Mil Máscaras, the man of a thousand masks, kept his on out to dinner. "To me, they were real superheroes." The Incredible Hulk TV show handed him a protagonist split down the middle, rational thought wrestling rage, "but for me later that would come out in my comic as life and death." The Addams Family taught him that macabre could run quirky and family-friendly, and slipped him a shock of recognition besides: "As a kid I'm like, oh, they got a Latino head of household in there." El Chapulín Colorado bounced across Channel 34 with a working-class superhero built out of parody. Then the White Tiger dropped into a mid-'70s Spider-Man. "It never bothered me that there wasn't one, because as a kid I wasn't thinking that. But when I saw one identified as Latino, the question clicked: why can't there be Latino superheroes?"

The permissions accumulate after that. Thor throws down with an Egyptian god, and Javier learns you can mix and match mythology. Ghost Rider puts the devil on the cover and rattles a Mexican Catholic kid who had never seen one there. Frank Miller drags Matt Murdock's Catholicism to the front of Daredevil. "It gave me license, or permission, to later on incorporate that into my own comics." He lands it flat and hard: "It's not just a guy in a blue and red suit flying around fighting Lex Luthor. You can do a lot more with these things."

By college the archive widens and his will to shape visual-verbal stories sharpens. He finally learns the name attached to the Aztec calendars that had hung on panadería walls his whole life: Jesús Helguera's "La Leyenda, Popocatépetl y Iztaccihuatl." Edward Munch's The Scream converts him to Expressionist art on the spot: "That character's inner turmoil is being shown in the background." Diego Rivera's conquest murals bulk the bodies up, "very thick and massive, that's how Jack Kirby would draw his characters." Posada's calaveras enter the same room. His eye flattens the hierarchy separating fine art from comic books and seats Rivera and Kirby together as colleagues.

Space-clearing, DIY

As with many Latinx comics creators of his generation, Los Bros Hernandez swung the door open wide for Javi. Jaime's Hoppers 13 focused on Maggie and Hopey along with Gilbert's Palomar taught Javi that comic book storytelling could also happen without capes and crime fighting. He learned that characters could not only fall in and out of love, they could age. "In most comics, Batman's been 35 years old for 80 years. In Jaime's comics, Maggie and Hopey get older. They get heavier, like we all do. They get grayer." They pulled that off in the early '80s on Mario's seed money and their own printer. "They're pioneers to a lot of us."

Javier then names his cohort and gets scrupulous about it: Carlos Saldaña's Burrito, Richard Dominguez's El Gato Negro out of Dallas, optioned now for a series and shooting in Mexico as we sit there, Laura Molina's Cihualyaomiquiz, the Jaguar, Rhode Montijo's Pablo's Inferno, Rafael Navarro's Sonámbulo. These creators cleared their own space, rasquache to the bone. "They put up their own money, they print their own books, they sell it, market it." He refuses to romanticize what it cost them. Molina was the only Latina any of them knew of in the '90s. "She didn't feel very welcome back then as a Latina." She published that one comic, then took her art elsewhere.

Making Diego

Diego de la Muerte in triptych, from Hernandez's slide deck.

The character collides two ideas on purpose. "I wanted to do something involving Aztec mythology and Day of the Dead folklore. So how do you smash those two ideas together?" His answer: a young man born on Día de los Muertos, killed in a car wreck on his twenty-first birthday, resurrected by Mictlantecuhtli.

The room leans in once he gets to design. He refused spandex from the start. "I wanted to give him a mariachi suit. I wanted it to be identified just when you look at him. You can identify him as mexicano through the suit." He lifted the chest logo from a skull on an Aztec pyramid, then flattened it out. "I simplified it and stylized it, because I wanted it very graphic and very iconic." Even the face paint solves a problem, since Diego dies already suited up and made up, on his way to the party. He built the name by ear off Día de los Muertos. "Somebody told me once, that's so metal."

Javi's stretched the character considerably since. Manga Muerto drops Diego into Japan as an exchange student piloting a giant robot called Skeletron from his cell phone, an homage to Gigantor and Giant Robot. Weapon Tex-Mex crosses over, because "we have a fight together, that time-honored tradition of superheroes." Moving to graphic novels changed his whole metabolism. The format takes him off the market for a year and a half at a stretch, and he'll trade that: "I like the freedom of having that 140-page canvas from the get-go."

The 800-pound gorilla

The film chapter: El Muerto (2007) and Hernandez with star Wilmer Valderrama.

Everybody wants the Hollywood chapter, and Javier tells it as farce. An NPR reporter hunting Latino comics creators, well ahead of the curve, sat down at his table at San Diego Comic-Con for fifteen minutes and left. Javier figured that was that. Director Brian Cox heard the segment while driving a stick shift and somehow managed to scribble down his name. Months later a letter turned up in Javier's P.O. box from a production company that wanted to buy comics they couldn't find in L.A. shops. More months went by before the meeting on Sunset, where Cox asked most of the questions and Javier admitted he hadn't figured out all the answers yet. "Maybe that's why he liked me, as opposed to the usual BS you get in Hollywood."

Then comes the part Javi wants the young creators in the room to write down. Get a lawyer. "I don't care how nice and friendly the people are." He is equally clear about what he actually signed away: "It's just for the media rights. It's not signing the character away." He kept the comics, the art, the merchandise. When he asked his lawyer whether he had creative control, the lawyer set him straight: "Creative control means you have the right to be ignored." El Muerto, starring Wilmer Valderrama, reached screens in 2007, nine years after the photocopied debut.

"No one should know all the creators"

Someone in the Q&A asks whether current politics shape the book. Javier answers candidly that he keeps the storyline apart from it. "Politics can be divisive. I just want the comic to be accessible to anybody." Affect is what he pours in instead, and he can name its source precisely. Diego's mother died in childbirth, his father vanished, and the melancholy trailing him arrives with a soundtrack. "That comes from me being an '80s kid listening to The Cure and The Smiths. If it wasn't for The Cure and The Smiths, I don't know if El Muerto would exist the way it exists now."

Asked whether the mainstream ever came calling, he stays dry. Joe Quesada "never called, never wrote." The support that mattered came from the guys at the next table and from the readers, "a big Latino audience obviously, but not just Latino."

Then he offers the sentence I want every Latinx comics panel to open with from here on out. Back in the late '90s and early 2000s, Javi mentions how he could name every Latino creator working. That he could count them on two hands. Today, he can't keep up, and this fact cracks a big smile of joy. "I'm glad I don't know them all, because no one should know all the creators in one field. There should be so many."

Javi helped build this Latinx comics ecosystem, not just as a pionering role model. He co-cofounded with the late Ricardo Padilla, The Latino Comics Expo. It lands at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach the first weekend of every December, and Sunday runs free. After mentioning this year's dates, December 5-6, he gives a shout out to the Texas Latino Comic Con in Dallas every summer along with our very own Austin-based MexAmeriCon that takes place every Día de los muertos weekend and BiPOC PoP on the UT campus the first weekend of every March.

Javi signing at the Blanton

The line at the signing table ran long afterward, Javi working a purple marker across sketch paper while readers waited with their hands folded. The museum's tote bags say Art is Where You Find It. Javier found it in two boxes his brother didn't want anymore, on a panadería calendar, on the face of a man who wouldn't take off his mask. A quarter century after a photocopied comic at the Alternative Press Expo, it's on the wall.

Check out Javier Hernandez's original art hanging in the Blanton's Latino art gallery highlight, There Goes My Hero: Comics and Luchadores.