[00:00:00] Que ondas, primos, primas, y primas?
[00:00:02] Welcome to my, My Primos, My Primos, My Primos Podcast
[00:00:08] My name is Freddy, My name is Kevin Garcia, My name is Elia Maria Matriz,
[00:00:12] This is Chikunma, whenever I can make it.
[00:00:14] My Primos Podcast discusses all things fandom and pop culture,
[00:00:17] From comics, movies, to whatever obsession we have this week.
[00:00:21] But, with the Latin A, Latina, my Latina, perspective, remember we're all primos,
[00:00:25] We're all primos, we're all primos, no matter what part of the world we're from.
[00:00:30] Que ondas, primos, y primas, y primas?
[00:00:35] And welcome back to My Primos Podcast.
[00:00:37] My name is Primo Freddy, and with me tonight is my Primo and yours, Mr. Kevin Garcia underscore.com
[00:00:45] So what's up Kevin?
[00:00:46] What's up Kevin? Which is why do you add extra dots and underscores?
[00:00:50] It's just because it's dot com man.
[00:00:52] Look it's either Kevin Garcia dot com or Kevin Garcia underscore com
[00:00:55] But not Kevin Garcia underscore com dot com
[00:00:58] You know what it is? I'm holding it over your head because you told us a lie,
[00:01:02] shenanigans saying that he owns Kevin Garcia dot com.
[00:01:06] I do, I just don't have the freaking, I don't know what I'm supposed to get some kind of like a
[00:01:10] DNS, I don't know what the heck it's called.
[00:01:12] I have to get something through GoDaddy and they want me to pay like a bunch of extra money
[00:01:16] just so everybody can get it without it tripping their like malware detector.
[00:01:20] There's no malware on my website. It's just it forwards to my free word press.
[00:01:24] Like I'm very...
[00:01:24] Deovirus Kevin Garcia.
[00:01:26] I'm a high school teacher. I am very cheap.
[00:01:28] Deovirus.
[00:01:30] Well speaking of, we are back females. We had a little bit of a break.
[00:01:35] Elia's out today in Chigume. I think it's traveling somewhere in the Tundras again.
[00:01:39] It's always out doing this thing.
[00:01:40] But tonight of course me and Kevin are with you.
[00:01:42] We have a special guest, Mr. Kevin Garcia.
[00:01:44] I want you to go ahead and introduce our special guest for the evening.
[00:01:48] We have Professor Gabrielle Cruz who I know through TikTok as Dr. C.
[00:01:54] He has these amazing TikToks where he's constantly comparing things like movies and TV,
[00:02:01] but especially comic books while looking at them through a Latino lens much like we do in a much
[00:02:07] less academic way here on the podcast.
[00:02:10] But you can also find him on his own podcast, Office Hours with Dr. C.
[00:02:15] Dr. C, could you introduce yourself?
[00:02:17] Sure. Yeah. I think I'd happy to do so.
[00:02:20] Yeah. So I'm Dr. C and it just occurred to me on social media, no one ever calls me Primo,
[00:02:26] but I get teal from time to time and I think because I look really friggin old.
[00:02:33] But yeah. So I study superheroes in particular.
[00:02:36] I study superhero narratives, broadly speaking, whether that's on the comic book page or on
[00:02:40] TV or film and how they operate as ways of transferring ideologies to audiences
[00:02:47] and that kind of thing, particularly when it comes to race, class and gender.
[00:02:50] So yeah, I'm happy to be here and talk to you all about it.
[00:02:54] You know, I'm getting I'm getting I mentioned Kevin.
[00:02:58] I'm stopping you.
[00:02:59] All right. All right. You go. You go.
[00:03:02] I'm going to be I have a question because my son stopped me one day.
[00:03:06] We went to we went to Austin.
[00:03:09] We visited with Professor Latinx, Ferreira, the old man.
[00:03:13] Yeah.
[00:03:15] Yeah, I'm not familiar, but he's a fan fan and friend of the show.
[00:03:20] I'm going to say it out loud, Fred.
[00:03:22] But when we went to talk, my son was like, hold on.
[00:03:26] So he teaches a class about superhero movies.
[00:03:32] Like, well, there's more than more involved,
[00:03:35] but I didn't didn't have an answer for him.
[00:03:37] So for people that I don't know, you legitimately cover the narratives
[00:03:43] from comic books or just superheroes in general.
[00:03:46] Like, can you explain it a little more for the 14 year olds and like my son?
[00:03:51] Like you could be a professor of.
[00:03:54] Yeah.
[00:03:55] Hold up. If I didn't already know Freddy had a teenage son,
[00:03:58] I would think this one of those long roundabout ways to my friend has a question.
[00:04:04] Not me. Not me. My friend has a question.
[00:04:06] No, no. I'll own it. I'll own it. I'll own it. Trust me.
[00:04:09] I know it. I want to major and say by the bell.
[00:04:12] But you know what hasn't happened yet?
[00:04:14] Listen, I was at a conference a couple years ago where someone gave a presentation on soap operas.
[00:04:19] And that was their primary area of research.
[00:04:21] Like, that's a thing, man.
[00:04:22] Right. So yeah, actually, a couple things real quick.
[00:04:25] One, you mentioned Professor Latinx.
[00:04:28] I am a big fan of Louis, Frederick, and that's good because you can't get anywhere
[00:04:34] near comic book studies without getting into his work.
[00:04:37] Exactly.
[00:04:38] And actually, a good friend of mine, Anthony Ramirez, Dr. Anthony Ramirez now,
[00:04:44] was a student of his and you know, it's so it's funny.
[00:04:47] This is the second time I've encountered Aldama by proxy.
[00:04:51] But yeah, so when it comes to superhero narratives, basically what the way
[00:04:54] if I do the elevator pitch superheroes are characters that are modern visions of the
[00:05:02] future that are burdened with the sins of our past in some pretty meaningful ways.
[00:05:07] So like they deal with time both in the past and present in the future.
[00:05:11] And so that's why I like studying them is because they are larger than life symbols
[00:05:16] for dealing with not just anxieties, but also aspirations about how society operates.
[00:05:22] Maybe the best example or one of the best examples is the X-Men
[00:05:26] because they a lot of people think of them as like a commentary on like civil rights issues
[00:05:32] and discrimination and things like that.
[00:05:33] And that's a bit of that kind of yes, depending on what time you're looking at them.
[00:05:37] Certainly post 80s right with Clis Claremont run.
[00:05:39] Very above the water, right?
[00:05:41] Like very basic.
[00:05:42] Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:43] I mean, we know we can't give him too much credit,
[00:05:46] but also they were trying to say something certainly, right?
[00:05:48] And Claremont knew what he was about.
[00:05:50] Yeah, Claremont definitely went in with intention.
[00:05:53] Stanley, it's arguable, but Claremont went in with intention.
[00:05:56] Absolutely.
[00:05:56] Now, the success of that, that's up the interpretation.
[00:05:59] Like I said, he knew what he was about whether or not he was particularly affected about it.
[00:06:03] But actually if you look earlier, one way to look at the X-Men
[00:06:07] is as a commentary on the anxieties around the atomic bomb.
[00:06:11] Also, especially their early 60s issues, 60s issues rather.
[00:06:15] It was the first, I think one of the first collected editions of the X-Men
[00:06:19] was called Children of the Atom.
[00:06:20] Yeah, one of the Atoms.
[00:06:22] Yeah, and there is, if I remember right, and Kevin may know better than I,
[00:06:26] but like there is a sort of hand-waved explanation of like,
[00:06:28] well it's because of nuclear proliferation.
[00:06:30] No, it's not, they flat out state it.
[00:06:33] Like the beast, they talk about his dad working in nuclear power plant.
[00:06:37] Professor X, his dad was a nuclear physicist.
[00:06:39] So there was all the idea that because their parents had worked around radiation,
[00:06:43] that's why mutants exist.
[00:06:45] In the 60s.
[00:06:46] And in that vein, there's two, there's a couple different ways,
[00:06:48] there's, back up for a second,
[00:06:50] there's a variety of ways you can look at it.
[00:06:53] Look at convokes and super-hero narratives.
[00:06:54] There are two in particular that I find particularly fascinating.
[00:06:57] The one is that what I do, and that is looking at how these characters operate as symbols,
[00:07:02] how these stories operate as moral logic.
[00:07:04] Right, because every superhero story has a logic to it,
[00:07:08] that is to say it's inviting us to see the world in a particular kind of way.
[00:07:11] Right, the other way to looking at it is actually a friend of mine,
[00:07:15] Dr. Julian Chambliss up Michigan State University,
[00:07:17] which by the way, Michigan State University has the largest publicly available comic book library in the world.
[00:07:23] I've actually, I borrowed from them before through Interlibrary Loan.
[00:07:26] And my buddy Dr. Chambliss, he is the director, I think of that museum,
[00:07:30] but he looks at them as cultural artifacts in their moment.
[00:07:34] So what can we learn about them?
[00:07:35] Actually last time I talked to him, he was working on a project looked at like how do
[00:07:39] the naming and labeling practices for the genres tell,
[00:07:43] what do they, what does that tell us about the moment in which they were created?
[00:07:46] So there's all kinds of ways you can look at superheroes and comic books and that kind of thing.
[00:07:50] I like the one that requires less history work, if I'm being honest.
[00:07:56] I mean it's a interpretation right, with anything we do.
[00:07:59] And I think that it's really like a great feeling that we can discuss.
[00:08:07] We talked about in the show a lot about how comic books are political, you know?
[00:08:13] Oh yeah.
[00:08:14] Yeah, definitely.
[00:08:15] And always have been, always have been.
[00:08:17] In fact I was just on a podcast from another TikTok mutual, High-Tailing Through History,
[00:08:21] and literally the whole thing we did, we did two hours worth of podcasts.
[00:08:25] That's just the history of all of comic books being political actually,
[00:08:30] although we recorded four hours.
[00:08:31] I talked way too much.
[00:08:33] But here you talk about academia, you know Gabriel, I'm having these flashbacks because
[00:08:38] my master's thesis was supposed to be about superheroes.
[00:08:44] As a modern oral tradition mythology, you know literally having them be modern gods.
[00:08:51] Long story I don't want to get into it didn't work out that way.
[00:08:54] I still got the thesis, I mean sorry I still got my master's, I have the master's.
[00:08:57] But I couldn't do the thesis the way I wanted to.
[00:08:59] That part didn't happen.
[00:09:01] But it involved kind of going through and seeing, you know,
[00:09:04] although we talked about Stanley and Chris Claremont,
[00:09:07] mine was about how the things that we attached to these heroes
[00:09:11] are the things that we as a society have decided are the parts that count.
[00:09:14] But that doesn't mean like one person went in and said I'm writing a story
[00:09:17] where the X-Men are going to be, you've never heard of them before,
[00:09:20] but they're going to be this great allegory.
[00:09:22] It's just that that part developed over time almost like oral tradition
[00:09:25] where people pick up on the parts they like and that's the part they remember.
[00:09:28] Yeah so sidetrack I've just, you know flashbacks to that whole situation.
[00:09:33] So in that vein when we look at superheroes and superhero narratives,
[00:09:37] there is a tendency for people to want to say that like, you know,
[00:09:42] Wolverine is this right? Or Gambit is that.
[00:09:45] And the truth is at some point you have so many different versions of these characters.
[00:09:50] Right exactly and it's not a matter of intention like you say it's a thing that
[00:09:53] develops over time. So really every person has their own iteration of these characters.
[00:09:58] And when it comes to like superhero narratives and that kind of stuff and actually my
[00:10:01] dissertation. So for my dissertation I looked at Steve Rogers, Mystique, Jean Grey,
[00:10:08] Miles Morales and Luke Cage. And how from the from the perspectives of race, class and gender.
[00:10:14] Right. And I took selections from you know each like each decade that they had a publication
[00:10:22] you know that came out that kind of thing. And I had to do that because it had to just
[00:10:25] be pieces because there's no way I'm going to read all the comics from Captain America
[00:10:28] from the 1940s. Right. He only took a break for about a decade and a half.
[00:10:33] And you know, hey, my thesis was supposed to be the entire history of Superman. So
[00:10:38] good day. Think about that for a second. I think our CEO thing. Yeah. Oh no, I got through a lot
[00:10:44] of it. So wow. So the so the argument that I made was that like as part of the reasoning
[00:10:49] for why I'm picking just a handful of you know additions basically was that
[00:10:56] we consume these things in fragmented pieces. Right. You read a couple of issues here and there.
[00:11:00] It's I mean, it's easy to take for granted that now we have things like Marvel Unlimited or DC
[00:11:04] Universe. Right. Where you can have all that stuff collected in one place. But you know,
[00:11:08] you used to have to sort through long boxes. Right. To find the comics that you wanted. And
[00:11:12] we would consume this media in a very piecemeal kind of way. Right. So that's why I went after
[00:11:18] collected additions because I can make the argument well at least we'd know that these
[00:11:22] comics could could reasonably read all together. Right. So we have we assemble out of the fragments
[00:11:29] our own versions of these heroes, which is why I can never love Scott Summers ever.
[00:11:35] Because you've read too much because I've read I read too much because when I studied Jean Gray,
[00:11:38] I read too much of her stuff and I was like this guy is a bag of dirt and I can't I can't do it.
[00:11:43] Little aside not relevant to this conversation, but I really wish they'd let him go full villain
[00:11:48] because Magneto has fully transitioned to a hero. Let Scott Summers be a villain
[00:11:53] because I think he's way more interesting as a villain than he is the hero.
[00:11:56] Yeah, I'd be more into it if he was a villain. The only time I pulled for Dr. Doom was when
[00:12:02] in Battle World, right? When when Cyclops has the Phoenix Forest and
[00:12:06] got him for a doom just crushes his head. And I thought that means going to Lord's work.
[00:12:10] Right. There you go. Anyway, but look, he's a dictator, but he got rid of Scott Summers.
[00:12:17] Hey, they made somebody happy. Listen, one for 10 ain't bad.
[00:12:23] Anyway, yeah. No man, it's a trip. But when you talk about the narratives, I think I saw one of your
[00:12:29] videos that I really, really connected with was a Death of the Author. When you mentioned how
[00:12:34] separating the work. Yeah, death is separating the work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean at this point,
[00:12:40] everybody has their version of right? Like just look at Spider-Man or Superman. Everyone has
[00:12:45] their version of Spider-Man or Superman that they grew up with or they like or they, you know what?
[00:12:49] That one has a badge on them. Like me personally, I loved when Superman lost his powers and he was
[00:12:55] the electric Superman. Like he was that blue streak Superman. I love that Superman. And also
[00:13:01] American alien. Like I love that run. Like that that Superman was sold down to earth.
[00:13:08] Is American alien the one where he went for the walk?
[00:13:11] Yes. Yes. And he gets drunk.
[00:13:13] That's one where like Superman can't get drunk.
[00:13:15] He did a little bit more with it. I wish there was a little bit more with that story,
[00:13:18] but I get where you're going from. Yeah, but I like American alien.
[00:13:20] And that's the point. The fact that you can like the blue Superman that was much
[00:13:24] maligned is the idea that anybody can like any part of it. And one thing that really
[00:13:28] got me when blue Superman was happening was everybody's like, oh no, this is Superman
[00:13:31] forever. And I'm like, have you never read a comic book before? Yeah.
[00:13:36] Well, and that's part of the beauty is that another reason that it's so great looking
[00:13:40] at these these stories is because they're not bound to continuity.
[00:13:45] Like really, I mean, they have they deal with the basic stuff of common histories that we
[00:13:50] understand like Steve Rogers comes out of the ice Superman lands in Kansas, that kind of thing.
[00:13:54] That's the or is the vision part I was talking about.
[00:13:56] Right. Right. And so because they can change though over time, right? We can get else world
[00:14:01] stuff like like Red Sun, right? Although I would like to see a more modern version where
[00:14:05] like Clark Kent lands in Brownsville taxes. Tell me about it, right? That'd be amazing.
[00:14:11] My hometown. Is it really? Okay. I figured you said it because you knew that.
[00:14:19] Get picked up by some rancheros was like we got Brownsville and maybe El Paso, I suppose.
[00:14:24] But yeah, so yeah, but El Paso is more city city. So right, right, right. Or just or a bit
[00:14:29] more like Red Sun and have them land in like what is but the idea of like you can have these
[00:14:35] more modern iterations of these characters. And that's a fascinating artifact in of itself, right?
[00:14:41] And Marvel has done that obviously with all their different universes, which I don't
[00:14:45] are they still have different Marvel universes at this point? Did they consolidate them all again?
[00:14:49] No, no, they just relaunched the ultimate universe. But hold on. I want to tie
[00:14:54] to what you said for a quick second because as you're saying that it occurs to me,
[00:14:57] there is a comic right now that we've talked about on this show that is basically what if
[00:15:01] Superman but in the Texas border. And that's El Paso Hedo. Yeah, yeah, which is basically
[00:15:09] early days of Superman like where he couldn't fly, but he was still you know,
[00:15:13] going after social causes. Yeah, so that does exist, but it exists in the
[00:15:19] in the indie sphere, which is kind of the thing. Yeah.
[00:15:23] But yeah, so when I was looking at those characters for my dissertation,
[00:15:26] and the reason I picked them is because they all occupy such niche parts of society.
[00:15:31] There is so much more to them than just like there's more to them than just beaten up the
[00:15:35] bad guy, right? Yeah. For example, like Luke Cage, right when you take character like Luke Cage
[00:15:44] who debuts in like 1972 something around that early 70s. Yeah. And Steve Engelhardt,
[00:15:50] one of the first writers, Steve Engelhardt, right, he takes over after Archie Goodwin
[00:15:53] leaves, says in no uncertain terms in the prologue to the Marvel Masterworks
[00:15:59] collected volume of Luke Cage, Marvel wanted that civil rights money. So they sent three white guys
[00:16:04] to create a black superhero, right? And then in the first ish first pages of Luke Cage hero for
[00:16:11] hire number one, an inmate comes up to Cage and says, hey, we're going to do a demonstration
[00:16:16] to protest like the way we've been treated, right? Are you down? And Cage is like, no,
[00:16:20] I'm not. I'm not getting my I'm not getting beat for someone else's cause, right? I'm in here to do
[00:16:26] my time and then get out, right? And that's a very different way of representing the character
[00:16:32] than we get than what we get in like Netflix, right? Or the Disney plus series now. Well,
[00:16:36] I want to jump to him in between for a quick second. There's a great article by a friend
[00:16:41] of mine Evan Narcisse who writes some black grandfather stuff now at Marvel. But he did
[00:16:46] an article on I don't know if it's on Gizmodo or the root, but one of those Gawker sites.
[00:16:51] And it was basically remembering as a kid reading this is when Luke Cage and Iron Fist were
[00:16:56] together as teammates, right? Reading as a kid and realizing, wait a minute,
[00:17:00] this is written by a black guy because that was when he went by Owlsley then Jim Owlsley, but
[00:17:11] Christopher Priest, my brain shut off. Of course, that was what Christopher Priest was
[00:17:14] writing that briefly. And, and you know, reading it, he was reading some of the dialogue and
[00:17:18] especially the internal monologue Luke Cage. And it made a big difference to him as a young man
[00:17:23] where you could say, Hey, I honestly feel like this black man is being written by a black man,
[00:17:26] and I can feel that. And that made all the difference in the world for him. And at that
[00:17:31] kind of led to the Luke Cage we get in the series, you know, where it's clearly
[00:17:35] there are other voices in the room. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to like when Brian
[00:17:40] Azarello wrote Luke Cage and he felt like a Fox News trope. Oh, God. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That
[00:17:46] like six issue run. The Mac. Oh, God. I blocked that out. I should. I did some of my dissertation.
[00:17:52] I can't get it out my brain. That reminds me. In the ultimate universe, they had a another
[00:17:57] Hulk who was a black scientist who was a black man who worked with Bruce Banner on the project.
[00:18:03] I'm comfortable with this already. Yeah. I know. And now it's gonna be worse when you
[00:18:06] find it. Who wrote it? Mark Muller. So he's a scientist and he developed a way to become a
[00:18:13] Hulk without any of the downsides that Bruce has. And what does he do with all this power?
[00:18:18] He redesigns himself as a drug lord with gold teeth and tattoos and puts on a new affectation
[00:18:24] that he didn't have when he worked in the office just so he can take on a new personality.
[00:18:28] And I think he calls himself Tyrone or something now, which was not his original name.
[00:18:32] And I'm like, I would love to see that character introduced into the regular Marvel
[00:18:35] universe, but by some black creators. Right. The way that you remember, you.
[00:18:40] Yeah. But you remember DC when the Green Lantern. Oh, God.
[00:18:46] And if it's introduced him, remember we had a whole conversation about this.
[00:18:51] Yeah, buddy. This. Wait, let me just give some context here for a second. But before
[00:18:56] we get to what he's talking about, I want to give some context on me for a second.
[00:18:59] As a little kid, my favorite superhero was probably Green Lantern. Even though 90% of
[00:19:04] what I read was DC or sorry, it was Marvel. The one DC book I read of Green Lantern and
[00:19:08] I ate it up. All of it. I loved it. And then they killed off all the Green Lanterns with Emerald
[00:19:13] Twilight and they were going to have a new Green Lantern. And I'll be honest with you.
[00:19:17] I wasn't that big of a fan of how Jordan, in fact, John Stewart was my favorite.
[00:19:21] Hey, the mosaic series. That's Stuart is the best one.
[00:19:23] Yeah, but the thing I loved about the Green Lanterns was the concept of the best
[00:19:27] of every species getting together and saving the universe. I love that idea of that unity
[00:19:32] that they had and they replaced all of those with one guy. And I was like, all right,
[00:19:36] I'll give it a shot and literally open the book and it's just a bland white guy.
[00:19:41] And I was like, I was like 15, I think. And I was like, nope, I'm done. I was it.
[00:19:46] I stopped reading Green Lantern. And years later, people told me, oh no,
[00:19:50] he's Mexican. I go, what? So I went to go read this. He learned as an adult
[00:19:57] that he was secretly Mexican because his dad is a Mexican assassin. And I was like, what the?
[00:20:03] This is the stupidest. I'm like, look, it's a cario man. It sells books.
[00:20:08] I know I know my mother is blonde of Scottish descent. I know, you know, I don't speak good
[00:20:12] Spanish. I understand all that stuff. But at the same time, what was that?
[00:20:17] It's like DC's like we want representation. And then I found out later that hot girl,
[00:20:21] they're like, oh, well, hot girls also Latina. I go, yeah, she's Latina.
[00:20:24] But I read that maybe you've read more hot girl than I have because I've only read the description.
[00:20:28] Description says a Latina girl committed suicide and her white grandmother's soul took over her body
[00:20:33] and became hot girl. And I'm like, wait, what? Oh no. I'm like, what? A lot of depth there.
[00:20:39] What does that represent? Oh, like there's a lot there. But but on that note, that's why
[00:20:44] we wanted to bring you on here. Because we want to talk about this idea of Latino,
[00:20:48] Latina representation in superhero media, especially as it comes to Marvel and DC.
[00:20:53] And I kind of wanted to hear from you. What are your thoughts on that whole
[00:20:58] can of words? It's not great. It's not good. Honestly, I went when you were talking about
[00:21:03] the Green Lantern thing, I thought, is this when they introduced Hal Jordan and not how
[00:21:08] Jordan Kyle Rainer. And yeah, and yeah. Oh, by the way, real real quick aside,
[00:21:13] go back and read the first appearance of John Stewart. It's great. Because literally,
[00:21:18] Hal Jordan is looking at him and talking to one of the guardians says that guy,
[00:21:22] he can't be the Green Lantern. He's horrible. And and the guardian who by the way is
[00:21:27] telepathic and omniscient says, we don't need your bigotry here. Yep. He flat out says
[00:21:34] Hal is racist and knows it on a deep level. Which really makes sense for the whole
[00:21:39] genocidal, genocidal arc later on. Oh yeah. Well, not that and his best friend that he
[00:21:45] called by a racial slur for most of his appearances. Oh, all right. Oh yeah. You got to
[00:21:50] go back to the 60s for that. Hal's best friend was of indigenous Alaskan descent and
[00:21:57] I'm not even getting into what he was called for 20 years. Oh no.
[00:22:02] So that was your boy, man. Green Lantern. No, that's the idea of the Green Lantern,
[00:22:08] not Hal. Never how not hashtag, not my Green Lantern. Never how? Yeah. He's worse than
[00:22:13] never how. Yeah, good. Well, yeah, he's in the same conversation along with what's his name.
[00:22:23] He's going to be in the new DC movies played by Nathan Fillion. Oh, Guy Gardner. Guy Gardner.
[00:22:29] No, Guy Gardner is different. And I'm not going to defend Guy Gardner as a character,
[00:22:32] but I will say Guy Gardner and John Walker, a US agent. What's interesting about both of them
[00:22:37] is that they are bad people that are trying to become good people. Like they're literally,
[00:22:43] both of them individually will be the kind of guy that will say to either Sam Wilson or John Stewart,
[00:22:48] I have a black friend, you know? And the other guy's going to be like, oh, God, man,
[00:22:51] just shut up. Just shut up. But they're trying, but they're trying. Whereas Hal Jordan,
[00:22:55] he doesn't try. He's just a horrible person. So I'm going to tie this into something
[00:23:01] that connects to this and then I'll get into the aspect of Latin representation.
[00:23:05] Because this is actually a really good point. The way that I consider analysis of superheroes
[00:23:12] is a modern day, a historical consumption of them, because I'm assuming that the reader
[00:23:18] is reading that in this moment. So you take someone like Guy Gardner who has a bowl cut.
[00:23:27] That's important. That's an important piece of data. He didn't originally have a bowl cut.
[00:23:32] Because he doesn't, the death is in the death. Yeah, he did for most of his career,
[00:23:36] but originally he just had red full hair. Who else? Who else has a who else quite infamously
[00:23:42] has a bowl cut like real life villain? Are we going with Korea here? No, we're going with
[00:23:47] United States. And the last, oh God, it's probably only been about 10, 15 years.
[00:23:54] Dillon Roof. I can't, can't place it. Oh yeah. Yeah. I've heard that. You know
[00:23:57] what? You're not even the first person to tell me that and more to it, there is a group
[00:24:01] of online Nazis that call themselves the bowl patrol. And this is an example of like
[00:24:08] intertextuality because you have that horrifying Charleston massacre that happened a few years ago,
[00:24:13] right? You have that spinoff group of these idiots online who installed themselves that way.
[00:24:17] And now comes a question of whether or not they're going to have Guy Gardner
[00:24:22] with a bowl cut and the implied politics to go along with that in this moment in time.
[00:24:27] That seems kind of silly. I guarantee that became a symbol of hate.
[00:24:31] Before we get to the punishable, I guarantee you they won't put the bowl cut in there
[00:24:34] any more than they would give J. Jonah Jameson the little Charlie Chaplin massage because it just
[00:24:40] doesn't work today. Like it barely worked in the early 90s, but it definitely doesn't work today.
[00:24:45] So yeah, so that I use that example to bring to the point of like when you consume media now,
[00:24:50] you're consuming it in your moment of your context and that kind of thing and how that
[00:24:53] informs it. So going back to the thing about Latin representation, actually my favorite example
[00:24:59] for representations of Latinos in comic books is not the first Latino, right? Who was Hector Ayala,
[00:25:08] right? Well, definitely. Let's get to that. I'll give you the history. We'll show you.
[00:25:13] Who's the guy? Who's the guy you're talking about? Exceranio. Oh yeah, the one from DC Comics.
[00:25:19] He's also not the first from DC either. Oh my Lord, let me just really quickly tell you
[00:25:24] who the first was from DC. It's great. So there's this guy called The Whip and he's basically
[00:25:30] just Zorro, just flat out Zorro with the serial number. I forgot about it. But here's the funny
[00:25:34] part. His origin is that he's a white American that went down to Latin America and decided to
[00:25:40] become a hero by taking on a fake Mexican accent while fighting crime so that when he puts on
[00:25:46] the mask he goes, these, these, the weep. And then and then he takes it off and he's like,
[00:25:51] well, honey, that guy really saved the day, didn't he? You know, and that was an actual
[00:25:55] DC, that was DC's attempt at like, let's cover Latin America. At least, at least El Cabang,
[00:26:02] right? And when I had some charm to it, right? Definitely. Wait, but as we continue,
[00:26:08] we only get to Exceranio. Freddie, I want to share some pages that Freddie and I had
[00:26:14] collected before of some superheroes from Marvel and DC to kind of go through some of them and
[00:26:18] kind of look at a little bit about what they mean. And we have Exceranio in here. So that's why
[00:26:22] I wanted to talk about it a little bit. Yeah, he's part of the deck. Yeah, part of the deck.
[00:26:26] So first on our list, we have Aranya who goes by, who occasionally goes by Spider Girl.
[00:26:31] This was the idea of having a Latina super Latina Spider Girl, obviously.
[00:26:36] And one of the things they did was they wanted to go all in on that Latina aspect
[00:26:41] by even having her name with an Anya, but her civilian name is Anya spelled with a Y,
[00:26:47] which I think is an interesting choice. And I just wanted to really quick get your perspective.
[00:26:52] They're trying to increase representation and they do that by saying
[00:26:59] that she is Spider-Man, but we're not going to call her Spider Girl, we're just going
[00:27:02] to call her by a Spanish name instead. So there's a, yeah, because I remember that
[00:27:10] there's some sort of discourse in the comic about whether or not she goes by Spider Girl,
[00:27:13] right? Because there's some other characters as well. Actually, I want to take this opportunity
[00:27:16] to reference a great book called Graphic Borders. That's in a comic book's Past,
[00:27:20] Present, and Future, which was edited by Aldama and Christopher Gonzalez. And it has
[00:27:26] a chapter that I use often related to Spider Girl. And in particular, it has to do with
[00:27:31] the way in which she's depicted. And like she's 14. Yeah, well, she was when she started.
[00:27:36] Well, she was when she started, right? And that's the first thing that comes to mind, honestly,
[00:27:40] because the way in which they depict her is not just consistent with superhero narrative,
[00:27:45] superhero depictions of women, right, with adult figures, even when they're minors,
[00:27:52] but also is consistent with the way in which women of color are often depicted.
[00:27:58] I'm going to put a little asterisk on there, because when she first appeared,
[00:28:05] she was drawn very anti-traditional superheroes. She was shown, she had a she had a teenage figure.
[00:28:11] She wasn't John, you know, Busty and she wasn't wearing skin tight clothing. She was drawn wearing
[00:28:17] a t-shirt over baggy pants, which I personally didn't like as a costume, not because I didn't
[00:28:23] think it made sense for her, but because I wanted her to become as iconic a Spider Man.
[00:28:27] And it's hard to do that when you look like you're wearing street clothes.
[00:28:30] And so it wasn't until after her series was castled that they started putting her in skin
[00:28:35] tight outfits and then even had her have a comic where she's in a skin tight outfit and says,
[00:28:39] you know what? I'm just going to call myself Spider Girl now. Like she just flat out says it.
[00:28:42] I know that in the chapter I'm thinking of, so it's chapter 10, Anya Sofia Aranya Corazon,
[00:28:49] the inner webbing in Mexican Reconization of Spider Girl by Isabel Neyan.
[00:28:54] I forget when in the publication history, so let me back up for a little bit,
[00:28:56] but at some point she looks at some of the cover art in particular used for the character.
[00:29:03] And cover art is its own thing, right? Yeah, very often very different from what's inside the book.
[00:29:08] But yeah, I mean it's a part of that dialogue around like Spider Folk, right? And how we have
[00:29:13] so many different versions of Spider-Insert identity, right? Whether that's Anya the Spider Man,
[00:29:21] right? Or Spider Noir or Spider-Punk or any of that, right? Like, and then I have an image here,
[00:29:27] look of them. Yeah, so that first, so yeah the cover art does show her very busty,
[00:29:33] but in the book she just was a different artist, I think, and they had her drawn different.
[00:29:38] That middle one actually looks like a different Spider Girl, but the rest are her.
[00:29:43] I think so. I think that one on the far left is the one that's used, is one of the
[00:29:47] ones that's used. Yeah, that's definitely the cover of one of the early books. So you're
[00:29:50] right. You're right. I just remember she did dress like a teenager, so there was that. But yeah,
[00:29:56] it's what you're saying. But there's the rhetoric of the cover art, right? And that's supposed to
[00:30:01] gain the attention of people as an advertising piece. That's the truth. I mean, it gets you
[00:30:07] get into gender and away from the Latino representation for a second and there was the Emma Frost series.
[00:30:12] The Emma Frost series was entirely about Emma Frost when she was a teenager,
[00:30:17] but every single cover was Greg Landart with her legs open on the cover,
[00:30:23] every single cover. And even though on the inside it was her when she was like 14 trying to figure
[00:30:27] things out, on the cover there she is at age 30 in a bikini. And it was like that was a choice.
[00:30:33] But that's a whole other thing. Yeah, so the other thing that comes to mind about Aranya is
[00:30:40] that there's a lot of politics around the why, right? Because her name is,
[00:30:46] I understand it and correct me if I'm wrong, but her name proper is Anya with the tilde, right?
[00:30:52] The why is, well, I think she even says that she uses the why as a way of sort of placating
[00:30:56] English speakers. Right? And so that's an interesting point because there is the,
[00:31:02] what's the term looking for? There's a meta perception that Latinos often have to engage
[00:31:08] with as do a lot of other minority groups and marginalized peoples. And that is a meta
[00:31:12] perception is the idea that we are aware of how other people perceive us. And so we
[00:31:15] modify accordingly, right? It's sort of related to the idea of like the double consciousness from
[00:31:22] W.E.B. Du Bois and the African American experience. But that the politics around the why and the Anya
[00:31:28] are very much reflective of a certain lived experience. And we talk about that, we talk
[00:31:36] about before we start recording, we're talking about our own names. And I've said several
[00:31:40] times that I don't like the name Kevin because you know, the name Garcia is basically the Spanish
[00:31:45] Smith. It's like the most common Mexican last name. And yet my first name, you cannot get
[00:31:49] any wider and it does not translate to Spanish. And it's always your nuts. People are like,
[00:31:53] why don't you change it? And I'm like, at this point I branded it. At this point,
[00:31:56] I've got the website, trust me, the words. And Salvador, I knew like three Kevin's
[00:32:03] their kids or name Kevin, Kevin or Kevin. Yeah, my great grandmother always
[00:32:08] Kevin. I know a guy named Douglas Jefferson, like that, like this name, Wilmer. Yeah, I have a cousin
[00:32:21] named Hillary who was named after Hillary Clinton, but her mother didn't speak in English. She just
[00:32:26] this was an Hillary was first running for president. And her mother had difficulty
[00:32:30] saying her name in English. And I'm like, we'll just say a lot of in Spanish, you know,
[00:32:34] but she really wanted to be Hillary. So I was appreciated junior as a name. Oh, yeah. I've known
[00:32:41] a couple of couple of Latin families with juniors. Yeah.
[00:32:45] Yeah.
[00:33:01] It's easy, man. Like I'm a junior technically. My dad's name is Freddie, but they spelled it wrong,
[00:33:09] apparently in my dad's eyes. So my name to quick, quick little quick story. So my name's FRE,
[00:33:17] the IE and my middle name is Stanley. So when they asked my mom, my name's Freddie, Stanley,
[00:33:25] Mejia, like where do these names come from? Well, your dad's name is Freddie. It's not
[00:33:32] Alfredo. Nope, it's Freddie. And it's not Freddie, right? So Stanley, that's what they say. Stanley.
[00:33:42] They go, what is this? Oh, because your mom had Stanley pots and pans. And I had Stanley tools.
[00:33:53] And so I correlated it with a strong sturdy metal. That's why I named Stanley. And then
[00:34:01] told my mom, mom, is this true? She goes, he's fucking full of shit. So there you go. That's my name.
[00:34:10] Sorry, my name supposedly was that I was the first grandchild born and that my grandmother
[00:34:15] came running into the room saying he needs to have a white name or he'll never get a job.
[00:34:18] Now she denied that till the day she died, but I really believe she said that.
[00:34:22] That feels right. That feels like a story of her. That's something she would have said too.
[00:34:27] My middle name is Arnoldo and I've never met another Arnoldo in my life and I'm not sure.
[00:34:32] Arnoldo or Ronaldo? Arnoldo. Arnoldo. Wow, that's unique. Yeah, exactly. I've never known
[00:34:39] another Latino with that name. I think my parents are screwing with me. That's...
[00:34:46] All right, Francis. Here we are. Name's Matt. Speaking of names and whether or
[00:34:50] not they meet the Vibe Check. I want to talk about DC, because I'm not a big DC guy,
[00:34:56] but I want to talk real quick about DC's, the one they always try to say, no, look,
[00:35:00] we've always had Latino representation and they're like, look at Vibe because what says Latino more
[00:35:05] than a guy whose powers are based on dance music? Right. Yeah, that's...
[00:35:10] Right. Like you could see right there where that's going.
[00:35:13] He was one of the best parts of the flash show though. I've heard good things. Yeah.
[00:35:17] He was cool. Yeah, I don't watch this show. He was fucking cool, man. He teleported through
[00:35:22] different dimensions. He can find people. It's just super cool.
[00:35:27] But I still feel like he was created specifically to be like, we want a Latino character
[00:35:32] and they're like, what do Latinos do? They dance. All right, give him music powers.
[00:35:37] Yep, that's... Let me drop a question in here before we dive deeper because
[00:35:42] John Avenger makes a comic book with Javina comics, the Paletero, like the last Paletero.
[00:35:50] And he wrote this book as like a zombie apocalypse. If I'm wrong, I'm sorry,
[00:35:54] John I'm butchering. I was having read your book, but I remember the beats.
[00:35:59] It is pretty much he's the last Paletero, but he's like fighting off zombies or whatever.
[00:36:03] And he's embodying that image of a Latino Paletero pushing the cart.
[00:36:10] And but he's, you know, he's the hero of the story and John being Latino writes this character.
[00:36:16] We kind of laugh, oh cool. We accept it. That's kind of funny, cool twist.
[00:36:20] But if someone else stepped in and did the Paletero...
[00:36:22] It's all context. That's the important part. Go ahead.
[00:36:27] No, I was going to say that it's kind of like the difference between going back
[00:36:31] to the Luke Cage example. Did y'all remember Dexter's lab?
[00:36:35] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:36:36] And you know what's his name? The creator, Genny Teterosky.
[00:36:41] Yeah, I can't pronounce his name, but that guy.
[00:36:43] He did a Luke Cage run.
[00:36:45] He did a Luke Cage run and it is all of the visual trappings of like Luke Cage from the
[00:36:50] early 70s with the his art style that he did for Dexter's laboratory.
[00:36:55] And it feels hollow. Like the Azarello run felt offensive. This one just felt like
[00:37:02] it was all flash and no substance for lack of a better term.
[00:37:05] And that's how sometimes these characters like Vibe come across.
[00:37:09] I've read an issue or two where he popped up.
[00:37:11] I really liked the version that's on the CW because I feel like they fleshed out the
[00:37:14] character somewhat. They made him more than a one note character.
[00:37:16] Oh, he's 100. Like I've only seen a few episodes of Flash. He's 100% fleshed out.
[00:37:20] They actually deal with the idea of like the dichotomous home life of what's like growing up
[00:37:24] in a Latino household versus having to navigate the real world.
[00:37:27] Like that's that's a thing that they deal with, albeit only in bits and spurts.
[00:37:31] But and to your point about like the Palo Teto, that's like that's being in on the joke.
[00:37:37] Yeah. Right. Yep.
[00:37:38] That's not being the joke if that makes sense.
[00:37:41] This is why I say context matters. And I go back to the example of
[00:37:44] Blue Beetle, the movie versus Ant-Man. And in Ant-Man there was one Latino character
[00:37:52] and his car has the la cucaracha noise.
[00:37:56] And from as an audience member, I laughed at that because this is the little bit of
[00:38:00] representation we get and it's a little nod to his culture.
[00:38:02] I'm like, you know what? Fine. I'll take it. It's funny. It's great.
[00:38:04] But then in the Blue Beetle movie, the whole movie is about Latino culture.
[00:38:08] We have a whole family there. We're getting all this stuff. I'm really getting into it.
[00:38:12] And then the car has the la cucaracha noise. And I'm like, and nobody comments on it.
[00:38:17] I really feel like it was added in post. That was not needed there.
[00:38:21] We already established culture. We're good. We're not doing a little nod to the hat to culture
[00:38:24] because it's an Ant-Man movie. No, this is a whole movie about Latinos.
[00:38:28] They did not need to put that song there. And it's still like I enjoyed every second of the
[00:38:31] family except when that song played that and when the uncle killed the guy.
[00:38:36] I did like Luis in Ant-Man, but I also remember thinking that man played Cesar Chavez.
[00:38:46] He went to space too. I always thought Luis should have come in after right at Endgame
[00:38:56] and given us the rundown of what's been happening since then.
[00:38:58] We just needed to sit down between him and Scott Lang and he just explains the entire
[00:39:02] Marvel Universe up to that point. That's all we needed. I was actually at San Diego Comic Con
[00:39:06] and they played a clip. I swear I remember seeing a clip of just the actor giving a summary of the
[00:39:11] Marvel Universe for the fans at San Diego. And I'm like, they need that. They need that.
[00:39:16] I have been wanting slice of life vignettes from Marvel for so long and Luis was the
[00:39:22] character to do it. That'd be the way to go, man. Why can't we do slice of life with
[00:39:27] these characters? It'd be fun. Speaking of slice of life, as a kid, reading comic books in the 80s
[00:39:35] and early 90s, I noticed something. I noticed that every time there was an X-Man character,
[00:39:42] a mutant who was not generic white bread character, they had to explain where they were from.
[00:39:49] If they were Latino, they were from Brazil. They were from Mexico. If he's out of
[00:39:53] German descent, no he's from Germany. He's not of German descent. So they always had to be from
[00:39:56] even Storm who was born in the US was raised in Africa. That explains why she's black.
[00:40:02] So I noticed, I'm not kidding. No, you're right. You're right. When Generation X came out
[00:40:09] and introduced this kid called Skin who was from Los Angeles. This was the first time
[00:40:15] where I felt like, oh my gosh, there's a mutant in the X-Men who is Mexican American
[00:40:20] and he is actually from the US. And again, there's nothing wrong with him. Grish, I love
[00:40:24] having representation of that. But the idea was that was the only representation we were getting
[00:40:28] in X-Men comics. The only representation we're getting was, in fact, Jubilee was the only
[00:40:32] other example of somebody who was not white and was born in the US. And so Skin came up. Now,
[00:40:39] Skin, once you get to his background, he's literally a ex gangster from East LA. That's
[00:40:46] literally his origin in the early 90s. And the funniest part is when you read, actually interviewed
[00:40:50] Scott Lovedell about it once. But when you look at why he created the character, he's like,
[00:40:55] flat out I was dating a Latina at the time and I decided he just says that. But honestly, look,
[00:41:01] while his life story wasn't my life story, growing up in Brownsville, I did know people
[00:41:06] who did grow up in gangs. So at least this was closer to something that I recognized than,
[00:41:12] you know, a millionaire from Brazil like Sunspot. I was like, Hey, here is something that feels more
[00:41:17] like my story. Even if it's not my story, it's closer. But what do you think about that?
[00:41:21] This character now.
[00:41:23] Yeah. Like, what do you think about that idea of this guy introduced this guy, but he's a gangster?
[00:41:27] Yeah. So it's, I like to think that progress is a series of problematic steps forward.
[00:41:35] Right. And that's, I mean, that's, that's, it's like, yeah, so you introduce a character
[00:41:41] and you use all these tropes. I'm sure you said he's from LA, he's a gangster. He's probably from
[00:41:45] East LA. Yeah. East LA. And not only that though, but in his official biography, they originally said
[00:41:50] he was Puerto Rican. And I'm not saying there can't be Puerto Ricans in East LA, but like,
[00:41:54] that's, that's a part of the diaspora. Yeah. There was nobody, there was no,
[00:41:58] no Latinos in the room when they were writing this character in the beginning.
[00:42:01] No, no, there weren't. So we can't, because you know, someone went, he's Mexican. No,
[00:42:06] we can't do that. They'll think we're racist. Let's make it.
[00:42:10] Actually, I think what happened is Scott Lovedell's girlfriend was Puerto Rican. So he just says
[00:42:13] he was Puerto Rican. So, so yeah, I mean, that's, that's the thing is like these characters are
[00:42:18] often like they're toe holds, right? Like they're just ways of getting in the door.
[00:42:24] I like to use example also of, you know, I mean, Black Panther, right, from, from Kirby and
[00:42:31] Lee was a collection of what's referred to as dark, dark continent stereotypes.
[00:42:37] Yep, definitely. Right. I read, I read a lot of pulp stories. I know exactly what you're talking about.
[00:42:42] Yeah. And so it's just, you know, he, he without, but without that character,
[00:42:46] we don't get the current MCU that we have now, right? Same thing with characters like this.
[00:42:50] Like you can probably draw a through line from a character like this to say Robbie Reyes.
[00:42:55] Definitely. Easily. Yeah. Because Robbie Reyes also from, from East L.A., I believe.
[00:43:01] But the idea is that there's a lot more to mention to him than just saying, oh,
[00:43:05] well he's a gang member. That's his whole origin. We're done now.
[00:43:07] Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, there was a lot more to skin than that, but that was,
[00:43:10] that was the bulk of it, you know? Right. So he was one of my favorites growing up.
[00:43:15] There's newer characters that I'm not as familiar with. I think Freddy,
[00:43:18] this is one of the ones you had mentioned. Yeah. From DC.
[00:43:21] I love Batman. And I always kind of
[00:43:24] hung back and go like, is the only Latino I have to really look forward to and seeing
[00:43:29] in these books is Bane. And even then. And he's got to see the movies.
[00:43:33] No, actually, he's different. I guess. Tom Hardy's version of Bane is based on a Romani.
[00:43:40] He's that actually would make some kind of sense. He's based on a specific,
[00:43:46] a specific Romani leader who was a bare-knuckle boxer. And that's because I racked my brain over
[00:43:51] where that comes from. I'm sorry, I'm afraid it sounded like a bad Scottish. No, you're there,
[00:43:54] man. No, no, I, yeah, we walked into that one. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. But that's
[00:44:00] when I read, well, I'll get to it. But with Asuka, Asuka is
[00:44:06] a character that I really liked because we met her very briefly.
[00:44:11] I think it was Suicide Squad and El Diablo, right? Yeah. And El Diablo, the Latino evil,
[00:44:18] he's a devil. Like, you know, he's evil, Latino, devil, whatever.
[00:44:21] But Asuka became like this like super soldier, you know what I mean? Like she has telepathy
[00:44:27] and skull sense and she can, she's a badass. And I really like that she was not a typical
[00:44:34] Latina you would see in these books, right? I mean, yes, she's sexualized and what have
[00:44:38] you, right? Because that was the time they were written. I know we'll get to that. But her
[00:44:43] abilities, she was smart as hell. She was a leader. She kicked ass and she was in the DC universe.
[00:44:50] And so when Asuka came through, I was really excited for this character, but
[00:44:54] they haven't really done much with her. If you told me about a Latina, if you told me
[00:45:01] about a female super character, a powered individual whose name was Sugar,
[00:45:08] I would think that's pretty condescending. But honestly, I don't know. I kind of get it,
[00:45:14] especially because of, I mean, I guess the reference to like sugar skulls, right? So with
[00:45:17] the Calavera paint. But yeah, this looks interesting. And honestly, it reminds me of
[00:45:24] there's a comic, I think it's an indie comic called Lady Mechanica.
[00:45:28] Yeah. I've seen the cover. Yeah, and there's a one or two stories where they go into Mexico and
[00:45:35] they have the smart those thing and everything is like turned up to 11 in terms of like the art
[00:45:40] and the things like that and the intricacy of it. It's been over the top. But this,
[00:45:47] I could actually see one of my sisters painting their face like that.
[00:45:51] And look, she is over the top, but I'm not going to lie. There's a big part of me that
[00:45:55] likes the fact that she's got a matador jacket that is the colors of the Mexican flag.
[00:46:01] Cool design, man.
[00:46:02] And that she's got this whole La Cartrina aesthetic going on. So it's like, yeah,
[00:46:08] it's a lot of weird stereotypes put together, but it works and it says exactly what it needs to
[00:46:14] say. But my fear is- It's because she has skull sense. The first mighty sense.
[00:46:20] But my fear was kind of characters that they just kind of end up in the background.
[00:46:23] You know, like you could go, you can either make her a new Deadpool or she could just be one of 50
[00:46:27] bad guys in the background. You know?
[00:46:30] In that vein, I think the folks often forget that there is a right amount of camp that goes
[00:46:35] into these characters, right? I mean, that's just- It's a careful balance.
[00:46:38] I read a fascinating book chapter about how Frank Castle, the Punisher, is male drag.
[00:46:45] Yeah, that actually tracks that character.
[00:46:47] Yeah, because everything he does is campy.
[00:46:49] Especially the early years where it was like over the top masculinity.
[00:46:54] Well, in this case, they were talking about the Netflix show and like he is, you know,
[00:46:58] from the way he walks and talks and chews and like everything,
[00:47:02] the way he murders people is so over the top, right? There's a lot of camp to it.
[00:47:06] And that's hard.
[00:47:07] Thomas Jane movie even more so.
[00:47:11] That movie could have been so good.
[00:47:13] His movie Dirty Laundry was a better version of it, right?
[00:47:17] I still feel bad for Thomas Jane because he to this day wishes he was still Punisher.
[00:47:20] Anyway, sorry.
[00:47:21] You know, he wrote a comic book anyway.
[00:47:24] So yeah, like, but when it comes to like minority characters, like camp can easily become
[00:47:29] derisive, right? And so this, I don't know, like I have to read more, but it feels right.
[00:47:34] All right. Next up also from DC, Aztec, the ultimate man, which I'll be honest,
[00:47:40] I know nothing about him except I liked his name and design.
[00:47:44] He came out when I was busy reading comics, but this is around the time they killed off
[00:47:49] all the Green Lanterns. So I just kind of gave up on DC.
[00:47:52] But still, if you're going to be pulling from common mythological tropes, you could do worse.
[00:47:59] I feel like I've seen this man painted on the inside of a Mexican restaurant.
[00:48:03] Yeah.
[00:48:03] He's on a calendar holding a dead lady with a feather in her hair.
[00:48:06] He honestly had like only a handful of appearances. They killed him off.
[00:48:10] There was a newer version recently who I guess the ultimate woman now.
[00:48:14] But still, Aztec. And it's interesting.
[00:48:20] But talking about...
[00:48:21] What did they pull from? Like we said earlier, like, hey, we need the Latino looking Batman
[00:48:27] slash Iron Man slash...
[00:48:28] Well, they also go for this whole like Empire of the Sun kind of thing,
[00:48:33] which is really more of Inca than Aztec. But like, you know, they tried.
[00:48:40] Semantics.
[00:48:41] Yeah.
[00:48:41] Next up, we have Fire, who is one of the bigger DC heroines. She's shown up in a lot of stuff.
[00:48:49] And she is Brazilian.
[00:48:51] But it does go into what we were saying earlier about where they overly sexualized
[00:48:56] characters, especially when they are like Latina or just anything that is quote exotic.
[00:49:01] You know what I mean?
[00:49:03] A lot of these characters have been light skinned so far.
[00:49:06] Yes. Yes, they have.
[00:49:08] And I think as we go through it, we get a... Oh, well.
[00:49:13] So before I go to the next one, do you think she would have a say on Fire?
[00:49:19] Sure. Yeah.
[00:49:21] I think we...
[00:49:22] Okay. Because I wanted to stop on Firebird for a second.
[00:49:25] Okay.
[00:49:26] This is a woman who's been an Avenger.
[00:49:28] She's probably one of the more powerful the Avengers.
[00:49:32] I mean, that's saying a lot right there.
[00:49:34] She has this incredible control over Fire that puts her...
[00:49:38] Not on par with Phoenix really, but she can do a lot of stuff with it.
[00:49:42] Right? And she can also heal people, all kinds of great stuff.
[00:49:45] But the big thing about her that gets me is that she was created to be a parody of a Catholic.
[00:49:53] Because she immediately gets her powers and believes that she has been blessed by God.
[00:49:59] And now God has told her to go save people.
[00:50:02] And then later on, we find out that her powers came because some drunk aliens are flying overboard,
[00:50:07] pulled the shoot on their garbage disposal, happened to land on her,
[00:50:12] and all of the alien chemicals gave her powers.
[00:50:14] And she's like, no, okay, it's still God.
[00:50:18] It's God working through mysterious ways.
[00:50:20] I mean...
[00:50:20] And then she'll meet Thor and she'll be like,
[00:50:22] no, you are not a God.
[00:50:23] You cannot call yourself that because there is only Jesus Christ.
[00:50:27] And she is very much like...
[00:50:31] I read a recent comic.
[00:50:33] Marvel's been doing these Marvel voices comics lately, I've heard of those,
[00:50:36] where they bring in people of communities to write them.
[00:50:38] And there's a Firebird story in one of them that is actually good.
[00:50:42] It's like one of the only good Firebird stories I've ever read.
[00:50:44] But a lot of her early stories are just like,
[00:50:47] ha, she thinks that Catholicism is real.
[00:50:49] And it's like...
[00:50:50] I mean, as a Catholic, I can reconcile aliens dropping space junk on people
[00:50:58] and giving them powers as being consistent with my understanding of God.
[00:51:02] So like...
[00:51:03] Yeah.
[00:51:04] That's big, man.
[00:51:05] God's everywhere.
[00:51:06] If you're only right here, you're underestimating it.
[00:51:10] It's huge.
[00:51:10] Paul put it, God is in the space trash.
[00:51:14] So she looks like she's uncomfortable as she's standing there.
[00:51:18] Well, to be fair...
[00:51:18] The first thing that stood out to me...
[00:51:20] To be fair, this is from Marvel's 1990 Master Edition Handbook,
[00:51:24] where all the characters were drawn to see every part of their costume.
[00:51:28] Which looks so weird, to be honest.
[00:51:31] It's not natural.
[00:51:32] And she's had better costumes.
[00:51:34] She's had better costumes.
[00:51:35] But I do want to touch on what you said a second ago
[00:51:36] about how all the characters we looked at so far have been light skin.
[00:51:39] Because I think you get a variety of things where you get like...
[00:51:43] Either they're...
[00:51:44] Everybody's drawn white, which is very common.
[00:51:47] Or you get a lot of characters who...
[00:51:49] They decided certain shades mean that character.
[00:51:52] So like Forge in the 80s, drawn bright red, like pinkish red, right?
[00:51:58] Shang-Chi in the 70s, as yellow as Firebird's costume.
[00:52:02] Right.
[00:52:02] And then when they would have a Latino, they would have them gray.
[00:52:06] Because they figured, well, they're not black and they're not white.
[00:52:08] So let's make them gray.
[00:52:09] And that would...
[00:52:10] A gray became the standard color for a lot of Latinos.
[00:52:13] One that really...
[00:52:14] Actually, I think I have it here somewhere.
[00:52:15] One that really gets me...
[00:52:16] I don't have it here is...
[00:52:20] Do I have it?
[00:52:20] Here we go.
[00:52:21] Sangre.
[00:52:22] Sangre is a character from Thor.
[00:52:25] And she only had really had like two or three appearances.
[00:52:27] Yes, there are two appearances.
[00:52:28] She had two appearances.
[00:52:30] And in her first appearance,
[00:52:32] she was an extremely dark skin Latina.
[00:52:35] Her son had died in an act of violence.
[00:52:37] So even though she is a cop,
[00:52:39] she has a side gig basically being the punisher.
[00:52:41] She goes after people and she's so good that
[00:52:45] she's able to out fight one of the Thor characters
[00:52:48] who has Thor's powers, long story.
[00:52:50] And punisher watches from a distance and says she has potential.
[00:52:53] And that's her first appearance.
[00:52:55] Now in her second appearance,
[00:52:57] same writing, same skill that she has in everything,
[00:53:00] but now she's drawn whiter than me.
[00:53:02] And I do not understand what happened between those two appearances
[00:53:05] that were five issues apart,
[00:53:06] where she went from being a very, very dark skin Latina
[00:53:09] to being extremely white.
[00:53:11] And it's just like,
[00:53:13] look, if we're going to have her appear more than once,
[00:53:14] we got to fix that.
[00:53:16] She must have found Jesus.
[00:53:17] I don't know what to tell you.
[00:53:18] I don't know.
[00:53:19] Maybe it's one of those marketing things.
[00:53:21] Like, you know what?
[00:53:22] Who made her lighter skinned?
[00:53:24] Who made work better?
[00:53:25] I wonder, maybe it was a printing error.
[00:53:27] It might have been a coloring error,
[00:53:29] but some editors should have caught it.
[00:53:33] On that note, you brought up earlier Ayala, Hector Ayala,
[00:53:36] not Marvel's first Latina superhero,
[00:53:38] but definitely the most well known,
[00:53:40] the one they would always trot out for years,
[00:53:42] until more recently with Robbie Reyes and those guys.
[00:53:44] I'm looking at the cops.
[00:53:46] Yes.
[00:53:47] Brian and Michael Bendis wrote that one.
[00:53:49] Permerelly dead.
[00:53:50] Yes.
[00:53:51] One of the few permanently dead characters in the comics.
[00:53:53] Right.
[00:53:54] But what's really weird for me is after they killed him,
[00:53:58] they brought in his niece to be the new white tiger.
[00:54:01] And then a few years later,
[00:54:02] they brought in his niece to be the new white tiger.
[00:54:05] The two writers did not know about the other character.
[00:54:08] So now there are two white tigers that are both his niece.
[00:54:10] His niece's niece.
[00:54:12] I think it's the proper girl.
[00:54:14] Nieces.
[00:54:15] Nieces.
[00:54:15] So did you have something you want to say about white tiger earlier?
[00:54:18] Yeah.
[00:54:18] So white tiger is kind of interesting because he so he started in 1975.
[00:54:24] He's a part of that.
[00:54:26] That kung fu.
[00:54:28] Yeah.
[00:54:28] The fact that it's happening at that point.
[00:54:31] Exploitation and martial arts.
[00:54:32] Right.
[00:54:33] Right.
[00:54:33] Where we also get like Danny Rand and all kinds of other folks.
[00:54:36] I think it was the karate kid also.
[00:54:38] Yeah, that's in DC.
[00:54:39] Well, that was in DC at the karate kid.
[00:54:42] Yeah, DC.
[00:54:43] The judo master was Charlton, but DC bought them.
[00:54:46] And both by the way, both karate kid and judo master were white guys that knew martial arts.
[00:54:50] That was cool.
[00:54:52] What's interesting about Ayala is his origin.
[00:54:56] Okay, this is actual origin.
[00:54:58] So there were these three guys, one Asian guy, one white guy, one black guy,
[00:55:02] who had three items called the network that gave them totems of the tiger.
[00:55:06] And together they were the sons of the tiger.
[00:55:08] And when they had these items, they knew martial arts.
[00:55:10] Well, one day they all decided we're going to quit being superheroes.
[00:55:13] They literally threw their amulets out the window.
[00:55:15] They landed in a trash can.
[00:55:17] Hector Ayala walks by the trash can and goes, I'll pick those up.
[00:55:20] So his origin is he found somebody's superpowers in a trash can because they threw them out.
[00:55:26] Yeah, trash.
[00:55:27] God is in the trash.
[00:55:31] Yeah.
[00:55:32] And it's kind of interesting because if I'm not mistaken, Ayala died.
[00:55:36] He was running from police, but it was.
[00:55:38] He was in a trial.
[00:55:39] It was on trial, right.
[00:55:40] Yeah, he was on trial.
[00:55:40] Matt Murdock was defending him.
[00:55:43] And the trial was not going to go his way.
[00:55:46] Yeah, and so it's always curious to me when you have these permanent
[00:55:50] deads because they don't happen often.
[00:55:51] It's like Bill Foster being killed.
[00:55:54] Oh God, that one still annoys me.
[00:55:57] It's dumb.
[00:55:59] It's bad and to be killed by a fake Thor.
[00:56:02] Right?
[00:56:02] Yeah.
[00:56:03] Now, killed by fake Thor, given a sham of a funeral in a really poorly thought out book.
[00:56:08] And then to introduce his nephew as the new giant man whose name is Tom.
[00:56:15] No.
[00:56:15] Right?
[00:56:16] Yes.
[00:56:16] Tom Foster is the new Goliath.
[00:56:20] Yeah.
[00:56:21] I mean, that's almost as bad as having the character named Jefferson Davis who's also a black man.
[00:56:25] Oh, but he's also Brian Michael Bendis.
[00:56:27] I swear, Brian Michael Bendis, I don't know if he's legitimately trying to do good things.
[00:56:34] Oh, he's no.
[00:56:34] He is legitimately trying to do good things.
[00:56:35] But he's just bad at it.
[00:56:37] Yes.
[00:56:37] Yes.
[00:56:39] It's like Chris Claremont, but I think Chris Claremont had on average a little bit more
[00:56:43] successes.
[00:56:44] It's just that...
[00:56:47] So Brian Michael Bendis adopted, one of his adopted, I don't know,
[00:56:50] one or both of his adopted kids are black and he wanted to make sure there were
[00:56:54] black superheroes that they could look up to and he makes Miles Morales.
[00:56:58] And it has to have been an inside joke for him because his Miles is Miles Morales,
[00:57:05] but his dad's name is Davis.
[00:57:06] So Miles could have been Miles Davis.
[00:57:08] Sure.
[00:57:09] But instead he has his mom's name.
[00:57:10] So what's his dad's name?
[00:57:12] Jefferson Davis.
[00:57:13] And that has to have also been an inside joke.
[00:57:15] There's no way it was.
[00:57:16] Why would you do that?
[00:57:17] Why would you do that?
[00:57:17] Right.
[00:57:18] And my daughter is who's preschool age is really interested.
[00:57:25] She loves Spidey and friends and her favorite characters are Ghost Spider,
[00:57:29] right, Gwen Stacy?
[00:57:30] Which is she called Ghost Spider because Gwen Stacy's dead?
[00:57:34] No, it's not because Gwen Stacy's dead.
[00:57:35] It's because it's a long convoluted story.
[00:57:38] But they really just didn't want to call her Spider Woman anymore,
[00:57:40] so they tried to give her a new name.
[00:57:41] That's the real reason.
[00:57:42] So she loves Gwen Stacy and she also loves
[00:57:47] Officer Morales.
[00:57:48] And I was like, oh cool.
[00:57:50] And I thought, I have some comics with these characters.
[00:57:52] No, you can't read them.
[00:57:53] They're not.
[00:57:54] There's no character.
[00:57:55] There's no story arcs.
[00:57:55] I don't know what with those characters that are not.
[00:57:57] No, in note, there are now.
[00:57:59] If you read the current run of Miles Morales Spider-Man,
[00:58:02] his dad is named Officer Morales.
[00:58:05] Okay.
[00:58:06] Yeah, his name is Jefferson Morales.
[00:58:09] Excuse me, hiccup.
[00:58:10] So they fixed it eventually again by bringing in people of color to be the writers,
[00:58:15] but they fixed it eventually.
[00:58:17] Solid and Ahmed's run of Miles Morales was the first time I believed that character was brown.
[00:58:23] Wait, oh, believed.
[00:58:24] Okay.
[00:58:25] Yeah.
[00:58:25] I thought you were talking about coloring-wise.
[00:58:26] I was like, no, no.
[00:58:27] I mean, in terms of like this, okay, this is actually like a Latino character.
[00:58:31] Well, one thing my partner brings up a lot is that
[00:58:35] they always present him as either being the Black Spider-Man
[00:58:38] or the Puerto Rican Spider-Man.
[00:58:40] And she's like, you know, there are Afro-Latinos in Puerto Rico, right?
[00:58:44] So it's like...
[00:58:44] Mm-hmm.
[00:58:46] Yeah.
[00:58:47] It was an attempt.
[00:58:48] It was an attempt.
[00:58:49] Yeah.
[00:58:50] On that note, I want to touch base on what I think has been one of the more successful attempts,
[00:58:54] and that's the modern blue beetle.
[00:58:56] You know, I already mentioned that I did enjoy the movie.
[00:59:00] The superhero part of the movie was generic superhero movie in the most generic sense,
[00:59:04] but the family part of the movie was something that I hadn't seen in an action
[00:59:07] movie, and that was a Latino family that feels real.
[00:59:11] Yeah.
[00:59:11] You know?
[00:59:12] Yeah.
[00:59:12] So what do you think about the modern blue beetle?
[00:59:15] So this is one of those characters that I've read more about than I've actually read, right?
[00:59:20] Fair enough.
[00:59:21] Going back to like the...
[00:59:22] True for me too.
[00:59:23] Book I mentioned earlier about graphic borders, there's a great chapter called
[00:59:27] The Alien is Here to Stay, Overnus, Anti-Simulation and Empowerment.
[00:59:30] And...
[00:59:31] I'm sorry, I'm laughing at how that title works with the blue beetle so well.
[00:59:35] No, it's about the blue beetle.
[00:59:36] I know, I know.
[00:59:37] That's why I'm laughing.
[00:59:37] It's a really well done title.
[00:59:39] It is.
[00:59:39] And like he...
[00:59:40] And they talk about how in the comics there's the immigration narrative that keeps
[00:59:43] popping up a few different times because he keeps getting the powers making blackout.
[00:59:47] He wakes up in Mexico, you know, it has to make his way back across the border at least
[00:59:50] a couple of times.
[00:59:51] But what I liked about the movie was that it underscores the idea of what if
[00:59:57] society conformed to the marginalized, right?
[01:00:01] Because his suit and obviously I forget, do they get into the movie that this is
[01:00:06] like a piece of colonial technology?
[01:00:08] They don't talk about where it came from.
[01:00:09] No.
[01:00:10] Right, so like but I mean if you know, you know...
[01:00:12] Yeah, yeah, it's hinted at but it only hints.
[01:00:15] This blue beetle is here to like help colonize the planet, right?
[01:00:18] So we have like a...
[01:00:19] Yeah.
[01:00:19] We have a larger than life force that is of a society that is latching on to
[01:00:26] a minority figure and it adapts to him.
[01:00:30] He doesn't try to use his powers to adapt to society the way that we see with
[01:00:35] characters like Clark Kent or Peter Parker who become reporters, right?
[01:00:39] They use their powers to advance within a pre-existing social structure with
[01:00:46] Jaime Reyes.
[01:00:48] The benefit is that the armor as a stand-in for like society kind of fits to his body
[01:00:55] and that's where he gets his powers from and I think that's a cool message.
[01:00:59] I think it's cool.
[01:00:59] I went to interview the director of Blue Beetle and when we said that and talked
[01:01:04] his focus was on the fact that we need this to succeed in order to have more, right?
[01:01:14] Yeah.
[01:01:14] That's the whole thing with all of these books, books, movies, what have you.
[01:01:17] But the fact that this movie like Kevin said like yeah there were a couple little
[01:01:21] blips, we want to call them that that we kind of look at but the film itself
[01:01:25] and how he said it, the care he took with the writer of course and him,
[01:01:30] everything from the music to the clothing to the family themselves.
[01:01:34] It wasn't just a solo hero movie, it was a family movie, right?
[01:01:37] The family are all heroes in here which is very Latino.
[01:01:40] They're all metidos.
[01:01:42] They're always in your business trying to help you and that made the movie
[01:01:46] just feel more Latino to me, just the family inclusion so I really appreciate what he
[01:01:51] did for that film.
[01:01:52] And the texturing with things like El ChapulĆn Colorado, right?
[01:01:55] Yeah.
[01:01:57] There's three people in any given movie theater who are going to know that
[01:02:00] reference and it's for them, right?
[01:02:01] Yes.
[01:02:02] Oh man, I love that so much.
[01:02:03] In fact my friend, a friend of mine sent me a spoiler of that scene
[01:02:07] beforehand and I'm like, I don't mind that it was spoiled because I was suddenly
[01:02:10] very excited to see this movie.
[01:02:12] And by the way, I'm glad you mentioned El ChapulĆn Colorado because
[01:02:15] Marvel actually has that character unofficially serial numbers scratched off
[01:02:19] in the Marvel universe.
[01:02:22] She was designed by a Mexican artist,
[01:02:25] Barthoramos, originally called the Red Locust although he eventually said,
[01:02:28] can we just take the red part off because that was a little bit too much on the nose.
[01:02:31] So now she's just called the Locust but she is always just hyper positive,
[01:02:36] always like we can do it.
[01:02:37] It's all about saving people.
[01:02:39] She's got a little heart on her costume that's from her grandmother.
[01:02:42] It's all about the goodness of who you could be and sharing that to others.
[01:02:48] And I'm like, I'm down for this.
[01:02:49] I like that character.
[01:02:50] All right.
[01:02:52] There she is.
[01:02:53] I also appreciate that even though it's a little bit copyright and fringy,
[01:02:56] I do appreciate the nod to El ChapulĆn in this character, the Locust at Marvel.
[01:03:01] Yeah.
[01:03:02] Yeah.
[01:03:02] Yeah.
[01:03:03] Now, Fridi, I called you Fridi because the fricking Siri calls you Fridi.
[01:03:06] Freddie.
[01:03:08] We're lying on stage too much, man.
[01:03:10] Volkin, I do.
[01:03:11] Every time I drive, I text that way.
[01:03:13] Volkin's a character you want to put on here.
[01:03:14] What do you keep telling us about Volkin?
[01:03:17] Oh man, Volkin was cool as well.
[01:03:19] Like I think the fact that he comes off as this Roman mythology re-embodied into a Latino,
[01:03:32] which I really dig because everybody's always up in arms about the Roman Empire,
[01:03:38] the Greek gods, all that stuff.
[01:03:40] And here we are having a Latino take on Volkin, that moniker, and he's a badass.
[01:03:46] He just has a sword and fire and flies and he's just a badass.
[01:03:50] And I think that more people need to see this character and we need to take on these mantles.
[01:03:56] Why can't we have an Athena, that is a Latina?
[01:04:01] Latina, the Athena?
[01:04:02] Athena, the Latina?
[01:04:02] I like it.
[01:04:03] I like it.
[01:04:03] The two on the nose?
[01:04:04] Yeah.
[01:04:04] But you know what gets me with these kind of characters is there's always going to be
[01:04:08] that contention that starts complaining saying, well, he can't be Latino and be
[01:04:11] the Roman hero.
[01:04:12] But they may have previously had an Irish American guy be the Roman hero and they didn't care.
[01:04:18] They care when it's brown.
[01:04:20] And if I can speak from a place of credibility with my PhD, fuck them.
[01:04:29] But honestly, two things occurred to me with this.
[01:04:31] So on the one hand, oh, it's cool to have a Latino character whose ethnicity
[01:04:36] and his race is not his superpower because so often that is the case.
[01:04:40] But on the other hand, right, Vulcan is the Roman god answer to Hephaestus.
[01:04:46] Right?
[01:04:47] Yeah.
[01:04:47] And most of us know Latinos with Greek or Roman names, right?
[01:04:53] Aurelio, Eracleo, Augustine, Cossindin, like the...
[01:04:59] I've known people named Ovidio.
[01:05:01] Really?
[01:05:01] That's all right.
[01:05:03] Did not like his name, but he didn't.
[01:05:05] I thought it was a cool name.
[01:05:06] Yeah.
[01:05:07] No, I mean, I think it's a good name.
[01:05:08] I mean, come on, Ovid ain't that bad.
[01:05:10] No, that's what I said.
[01:05:12] Yeah.
[01:05:12] One of the great poets.
[01:05:13] So like if you know again, that's one of those things like, well, if you know,
[01:05:18] you know, right?
[01:05:19] That's actually that kind of works.
[01:06:39] There's a minor...
[01:06:46] My whole thing here was to find a lot of very minor characters.
[01:06:49] And you talk about characters whose superpowers are not based on their ethnicity.
[01:06:54] And this is a really blurry picture.
[01:06:55] I'm sorry about that.
[01:06:56] But there is a really beautiful comic that only lasted, I think, six issues before I got...
[01:07:01] Eight issues, sorry.
[01:07:02] There you go.
[01:07:02] Eight issues before it got canceled called Weird World.
[01:07:06] And the whole thing is like, they did a mishmash of every fantasy world ever put together in one place
[01:07:13] and all of the magical creatures just don't get along well.
[01:07:16] Well, this girl is this teenage girl whose mother committed suicide
[01:07:22] and she's taking her mother's ashes back to wherever her mother wanted to be,
[01:07:26] her ashes spread, but she did not have a good relationship with her mom.
[01:07:29] And then her plane crashes into Weird World.
[01:07:32] So now she's a human girl in this world.
[01:07:35] And what's fascinating to me is that all of her adventures are based around the fantasy of the world.
[01:07:41] But all of her personal struggle is about this strange relationship she had with her mother,
[01:07:46] who is of Mexican descent.
[01:07:48] She was going back to Mexico actually to deliver the mother's ashes.
[01:07:51] And that was...
[01:07:54] To me it was beautiful that her culture was such a part of her character,
[01:07:58] but not a defining part of her comic if that makes sense.
[01:08:02] And I think that's exactly what you were talking about.
[01:08:05] Yeah, it becomes texturing in detail and not the crutch that you lean on to tell the story.
[01:08:12] Yeah.
[01:08:12] And by the way, I want to point out that I don't think there's anything wrong
[01:08:15] necessarily with having a character who's Mexican and is based around Mexican symbolism,
[01:08:19] but they don't all have to be.
[01:08:21] Yeah, we... Yeah, that's a good point.
[01:08:24] On that note...
[01:08:26] Yep, here's a character created by friend of the show, Terry Blas.
[01:08:30] He did the Reptile mini series, which really, really impressed me
[01:08:34] because he took a character that I'll be honest with you, I never really liked.
[01:08:38] He wasn't a bad character, he was just uninteresting.
[01:08:41] And then he gave him...
[01:08:42] No, it was a really cool character that just was ignored.
[01:08:46] Sure.
[01:08:47] But what Terry did was he gave Reptile a family so you could feel like it was a real...
[01:08:55] Kind of like what they did with Blue Beetle in the movie,
[01:08:56] where the family became part of the story.
[01:08:59] And what I thought was really neat about the family that Terry wrote is that
[01:09:02] it felt authentic without being a stereotype.
[01:09:06] For example, he's got a grandfather who spends all day playing World of Warcraft.
[01:09:09] Like why can't you have a Mexican grandfather that spends...
[01:09:11] Like literally his grandfather is from Mexico but lives here in the States
[01:09:14] and just plays World of Warcraft every day.
[01:09:16] It's like why can't he?
[01:09:17] Why not?
[01:09:18] Sure.
[01:09:18] And his cousin ends up becoming a sorceress.
[01:09:22] You know, she's a teenager who's now going to school under Dr. Strange
[01:09:25] and Dr. Voodoo learning how to become a sorceress.
[01:09:29] So I think it's pretty cool.
[01:09:31] Is Brother Voodoo the...
[01:09:33] I mean, Dr. Voodoo, is he the Sorceress Supreme right now?
[01:09:36] No.
[01:09:37] That's...
[01:09:38] Yeah.
[01:09:38] All right.
[01:09:38] So I personally...
[01:09:41] Buckle up.
[01:09:42] Okay.
[01:09:42] So look, I have...
[01:09:46] I know other people that have told me from their culture
[01:09:48] they have no problem calling him Dr. Voodoo or Brother Voodoo.
[01:09:50] I think it's weird that I'd be calling like Daredevil Captain Catholic.
[01:09:54] You know what I mean?
[01:09:55] Mm-hmm.
[01:09:55] No, it's very much on the nose.
[01:09:56] I think it's weird.
[01:09:57] But that being said, Brian Michael Bendis made him the Sorceress Supreme for a while,
[01:10:02] which I remember at the time was like, why are you doing this?
[01:10:05] Because you're going to give it back to Dr. Strange later.
[01:10:07] And I don't like the optics of taking it from the black guy
[01:10:10] and giving it back to the white guy.
[01:10:11] But yeah, Dr. Strange is currently the Sorceress Supreme
[01:10:14] and Dr. Voodoo is what he goes by now
[01:10:17] is currently the headmaster of the Strange Academy.
[01:10:20] So he is the one teaching the next generation of sorcerers.
[01:10:23] Yeah.
[01:10:24] There's a great book called Unstable Masks,
[01:10:26] Superheroes in Whiteness.
[01:10:28] And the first chapter in that edited anthology
[01:10:31] is all about how whiteness recenters itself in these narratives.
[01:10:35] The case they use is Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers.
[01:10:37] But yeah, it's always, it always goes back to it unfortunately.
[01:10:40] Anyway.
[01:10:41] I will say that in the case of Sam Wilson or Rody from Iron Man,
[01:10:49] yeah, we knew he was going to go back to the white guy,
[01:10:50] but at least we got a new hero out of it.
[01:10:53] Sure.
[01:10:53] What troubles me with Dr. Voodoo
[01:10:54] is that he was already a superhero.
[01:10:57] Right.
[01:10:57] So it wasn't like, oh, we got a new hero out of this deal.
[01:11:00] He was already his own hero.
[01:11:01] You just made him now secondary to Dr. Strange
[01:11:04] when he wasn't before.
[01:11:05] It's almost like saying you're flirting
[01:11:07] with making him important.
[01:11:08] Yeah, that's exactly what they did.
[01:11:10] But back on Terry Blas's characters,
[01:11:13] he made Eva, but he also made Eva's brother Julianne
[01:11:16] who has, I don't remember exactly why he has his powers,
[01:11:20] but he can summon an energy Mako-Widdle.
[01:11:22] And that's pretty cool.
[01:11:24] I don't know if you could say that.
[01:11:25] I have summoned with it for years.
[01:11:27] Some days I can say it, some days I can't.
[01:11:29] And I have a lot of friends who speak it more naturally
[01:11:32] than I do.
[01:11:33] And whenever they're in the room, I'm like, how is it?
[01:11:36] So but the other big thing about Julianne
[01:11:39] is that his sexuality is also a big part of his identity.
[01:11:43] He's very proud to be gay.
[01:11:44] So that's a big part of his character.
[01:11:46] And I think that's also, again,
[01:11:48] you don't have to be one thing.
[01:11:49] You don't have to be your Mexican hero.
[01:11:51] Yeah.
[01:11:52] Yeah.
[01:11:53] No, I think that that's the issue that we come across, right?
[01:11:55] Where we're kind of pigeonholed into one thing.
[01:11:58] Like one of the preemles in the past said that was it.
[01:12:02] Who wrote Danny Starboy?
[01:12:04] No, Andy Starboy.
[01:12:06] Danny Calvo.
[01:12:08] He's not with Grimcore Comics.
[01:12:10] Oh yeah.
[01:12:10] Yeah.
[01:12:10] Okay.
[01:12:10] Yeah.
[01:12:11] I know him.
[01:12:11] He wrote Andy Starboy, which is a great book, by the way.
[01:12:14] And really fun.
[01:12:15] He also wrote Tenok, God of Fire.
[01:12:18] Yeah.
[01:12:20] Well, I think you pronounce it Tenoch,
[01:12:22] which is legitimate as well.
[01:12:24] Tenoch, Tenok.
[01:12:26] I think that's how you say it.
[01:12:26] But either way, yeah.
[01:12:28] But what I'm getting to is that we discuss the fact that
[01:12:32] we get excited about me personally and my preemles too
[01:12:34] and almost everybody whenever we get Latinos in sci-fi
[01:12:39] because we've always been told to look at the ground
[01:12:42] agriculturally.
[01:12:43] We've always been told to be the ones that are workers.
[01:12:46] We're looking to the ground culturally,
[01:12:48] plant grow and fix things.
[01:12:50] But when we get to the fact that we can get to the stars
[01:12:52] and we can get to the sky and be something completely different,
[01:12:55] I've always made the argument that I want to see
[01:12:59] Latino ex-files.
[01:13:01] And like why, but we don't have to be blatantly
[01:13:04] throw it in somebody's face.
[01:13:05] It just is.
[01:13:07] You know that we have Latinos that are also experiencing
[01:13:10] weird cookie shit.
[01:13:11] You know?
[01:13:13] And I have always appreciated that Star Wars has been a big
[01:13:18] champion of that showing us that you can have Latinos in space
[01:13:20] that are also drug dealers.
[01:13:23] I thought you were right.
[01:13:26] I mean, look, they've made Poe a spice smuggler.
[01:13:30] For years, I was riding hard on the idea that Chewie is one of
[01:13:34] us because I mean, who doesn't know someone named Chewie
[01:13:37] who fits some of those profiles?
[01:13:39] And he's a mechanic.
[01:13:41] Isn't Cassian Andor, isn't his whole thing just illegally
[01:13:44] breaking into places like other countries?
[01:13:46] He's a smuggler and the criminal.
[01:13:48] Yeah.
[01:13:48] And then in the it's the one of the cartoons they have like
[01:13:52] they have other spice runners who were like coated las latino.
[01:13:56] It's yeah, it's a thing.
[01:13:58] So on that note, on that note, Marvel has these guys called
[01:14:02] the Eternals who are these these godlike humans that have
[01:14:05] been around for millions of years before humanity.
[01:14:08] And while yeah, when Jack Kirby first drew them,
[01:14:11] he drew most of them as white because this is a guy that
[01:14:13] grew up in the in the in the twenties and thirties.
[01:14:15] And when he thinks of perfect humans, they were blonde
[01:14:18] because that's what he was told to think even though he's,
[01:14:20] you know, a Jewish man himself.
[01:14:23] But he changed it over the years and he would add
[01:14:25] characters to his godlike people.
[01:14:27] So they were more diverse a bit at a time.
[01:14:29] Well, after Kirby left the Eternals, somebody's like,
[01:14:31] you know what?
[01:14:32] We need some Mexican Eternals.
[01:14:34] So what are the Mexican Eternals do?
[01:14:36] They are luchadors.
[01:14:38] So El Vampiro who is one of the few Eternals that
[01:14:42] does not have a real name is only known by his luchador name.
[01:14:46] He fights a deviant who goes by El Toro Rojo and that's like
[01:14:49] literally every appearance of theirs is just we are luchadors
[01:14:52] and this is what we do.
[01:14:53] So, hey, we got to be space gods.
[01:14:56] Does that count?
[01:14:58] And then Marvel recently introduced a character called Ape X,
[01:15:01] which is a nice pun, but it is about a it's a Latina kid
[01:15:05] from LA that gets a magical mask, which is obviously
[01:15:08] a luchador mask.
[01:15:09] And when he puts it on, he becomes a gorilla.
[01:15:11] So that's a thing.
[01:15:13] As we all do.
[01:15:14] Is that was that speedball?
[01:15:15] Yeah, that.
[01:15:18] Yes, that is that is speedball.
[01:15:21] But from a dimension where everybody in that dimension
[01:15:23] is a monkey.
[01:15:25] So just a quick side note.
[01:15:28] I am friends with some guys who do a podcast called
[01:15:31] A Geek History of Time, right?
[01:15:33] And they do deep dives of a given thing of nerddom.
[01:15:37] And my deep dives, I mean like six or seven two hour
[01:15:42] episodes on these things.
[01:15:43] Right.
[01:15:43] And I know I'm available.
[01:15:47] I'm going to hook you up.
[01:15:49] And Damien Harmony is Damien Harmony and Ed Blaylock
[01:15:52] and Damien.
[01:15:53] They're both high school and middle school teachers.
[01:15:57] I don't know what that's like.
[01:15:59] Yeah.
[01:15:59] Well, it's a special circle of hell.
[01:16:01] And Damien is a huge fan of speedball.
[01:16:06] We did, I think, five episodes on Civil War,
[01:16:10] on Civil War and its connection to speedball
[01:16:13] as the instigator in his storyline throughout.
[01:16:15] Oh, horrible.
[01:16:16] And how Peter Parker operates as a neo-liberal
[01:16:20] or a more modern liberal perspective on law enforcement.
[01:16:25] 100% accurate.
[01:16:26] And yeah.
[01:16:27] We had to get that book too.
[01:16:30] Yeah, we did do it.
[01:16:30] See, we didn't go in depth.
[01:16:32] No, we did one episode.
[01:16:32] But it was a good episode.
[01:16:34] We did seven hours.
[01:16:35] I really enjoyed working with Damien,
[01:16:37] but I thought I escaped speedball and here he is yet again.
[01:16:39] No, he's going to go back.
[01:16:43] So far is a character that my friend keeps picking on me
[01:16:46] because I am his only fan in the entire universe.
[01:16:49] He only had two appearances.
[01:16:52] But I'm just going to really quick say why I love him.
[01:16:54] First off, he is a Latino guy from New York.
[01:16:57] As a kid, he was possessed by hundreds of demons,
[01:17:01] just as you do.
[01:17:02] They were able to get all of them out,
[01:17:04] but one, as happens.
[01:17:06] And when that one gets activated,
[01:17:08] when he's like, I don't know, 18, 19 at this point,
[01:17:10] he becomes this,
[01:17:12] which is basically a cross between the Hulk and Ghost Rider.
[01:17:15] But what's great about him is that once he still has his mind
[01:17:20] in charge of this body, he's just a chill dude.
[01:17:23] Like literally, like, he's like, what is happening?
[01:17:27] He's fighting a demon possessed woman.
[01:17:29] He's like, I just want to be home playing Nintendo.
[01:17:31] And then the cops are like, what happened here?
[01:17:33] Don't ask me, dude.
[01:17:35] You know, I'm like, he's just a chill guy.
[01:17:36] And yet he looks like that.
[01:17:38] I was going to say this is like if Ghost Rider were a Chip and Dale.
[01:17:42] Yes, he looks like that.
[01:17:44] But also, like, I would read a comic that's just him
[01:17:47] and blob from the X-Men just hanging out.
[01:17:49] Oh yes.
[01:17:50] Marvel, I want to write Soulfire comics.
[01:17:53] Let me write Soulfire comics.
[01:17:55] I could do so much with this guy.
[01:17:56] I want them trying to get a table at a busy Sunday brunch restaurant.
[01:18:00] Like, that would be the best.
[01:18:02] Also, are those eyes on his pecs?
[01:18:05] No, those are just really intense nipples.
[01:18:09] Because they look like scowling eyes and they stare into my soul.
[01:18:15] I don't feel comfortable.
[01:18:21] Chimera is a new character.
[01:18:22] I don't really know much about her.
[01:18:22] She only had one appearance, but she is Latina.
[01:18:25] That's literally all we know about her so far.
[01:18:28] But what I wanted to show you really was
[01:18:30] Pedro the Peril who is, as far as I am aware,
[01:18:33] Marvel's very first Latino hero.
[01:18:37] He appeared in 1942 in Young Allies,
[01:18:40] which is a comic that also included one of Marvel's first Black heroes
[01:18:45] who was known as White Wash Jones.
[01:18:47] Now, just to be clear, Bucky is Captain America's sidekick.
[01:18:51] Bucky had sidekicks and one of them was named White Wash Jones,
[01:18:54] which I've read a lot of his appearances
[01:18:56] and my experiences with White West Jones is
[01:18:59] either he is drawn like a human being, but written like a minstrel show,
[01:19:03] or he is drawn like the most racist image of a Black guy from the 40s you can think of,
[01:19:08] but written like a human being.
[01:19:10] Like I've not found a comic where he's written and drawn like a human being.
[01:19:14] But inside that comic is Pedro the Peril.
[01:19:18] Now, Pedro the Peril is obviously a humor comic
[01:19:22] that is based on the idea of the bandito.
[01:19:25] Bandito, right?
[01:19:27] And it's surprisingly not as bad as it looks because...
[01:19:33] Tough sell, Kevin.
[01:19:34] It's a very tough sell.
[01:19:35] It's a very tough sell, but here's the thing.
[01:19:39] He is nowhere in the entire comic that he's in.
[01:19:42] He's only one appearance.
[01:19:44] Is there over the top of that, the ECZ language,
[01:19:47] which is every time somebody shows up
[01:19:49] who's Latino has that in the 40s.
[01:19:51] Right.
[01:19:51] Right.
[01:19:55] Okay, when I describe him to somebody, I describe him like this.
[01:19:57] He's a bandit who wants to be the most dangerous bandit in the world,
[01:20:02] but he does that by going to a place, finding out people are sad
[01:20:05] because a rich guy is taking advantage of them.
[01:20:07] So he beats up the rich guy to make sure everybody can have candy and food.
[01:20:10] And everybody cheers him and he goes, they're scared of me, right?
[01:20:12] And they're like, sure, sure, Pedro.
[01:20:14] And then I explain to somebody and they go, you tell me he's the Mexican Luffy?
[01:20:18] I'm like, yeah.
[01:20:19] Basically he is.
[01:20:21] Like he's like a guy who wants to be a pirate,
[01:20:22] but his version of being a pirate is helping people who are downtrodden.
[01:20:27] He that's surprising because he looks like if the Frito Bandito
[01:20:31] did a fusion dance with Emiliano Sparta.
[01:20:33] Yes.
[01:20:36] And the thing is also his wife, whose name is Bella Dania,
[01:20:40] but no, Bella Dania.
[01:20:42] They, it's all they, it's spelled weird, but it's someone
[01:20:45] didn't know how to spell Bella and okay.
[01:20:48] No, but the thing is, is that she in the one story that he's in,
[01:20:52] he's trying to stop this rich man who's taking advantage of the poor people.
[01:20:56] And he's not really sure how to do it because he's kind of a dork, kind of like Luffy.
[01:21:00] And she says, I have an idea.
[01:21:01] And he goes, no, no, you go to stay home where it's safe, be safe.
[01:21:04] I'll have my men protect you.
[01:21:05] Well, she goes and goes to do it anyway.
[01:21:07] And she ends up being the one that actually saves the day,
[01:21:10] but lets him feel like he got the credit.
[01:21:12] So I'm like, it's a pretty standard cartoon comedy story.
[01:21:16] And it also references, not reference, but vice with that with skin,
[01:21:22] you know, the gray color.
[01:21:23] Yes, they're definitely great colorskin that I was talking about earlier.
[01:21:26] I'll also say that he gets shot several times and the bullets just bounce off.
[01:21:29] So he's apparently bulletproof.
[01:21:30] So I'm counting him as the first Latino superhero of Marvel.
[01:21:34] Like, I, no, I think, and I think that scans and this would have been what, the 1940s?
[01:21:38] 1942.
[01:21:39] Yeah. Okay.
[01:21:40] So and, and, and you know, Bucky was a war criminal as a child soldier.
[01:21:46] Well, that's, that's a retcon back in the, back in the 40s.
[01:21:49] He just laughed and shot people.
[01:21:50] Now we find out that he was doing it under orders.
[01:21:52] He was, he was doing what works as a child.
[01:21:55] Yes, he was.
[01:21:56] But I mean like, no, that's, that's fascinating, especially because like the,
[01:21:59] the bandito is the, it was probably the most enduring, like Latino stereotype, right?
[01:22:05] Of, I mean, it's, I think, I think Charles Ramirez Berg puts it as like
[01:22:10] the proto stereotype for Latinos in American media.
[01:22:15] And it's still with the contemporary be the cholo.
[01:22:18] Yeah, yeah.
[01:22:18] So, so one of the other cases he makes is that, is that like, basically gangsters are the,
[01:22:24] like the, the modern day iterations of those, of those stereotypes.
[01:22:28] And obviously I mean things have gotten a little better, but yeah, that's,
[01:22:31] that's a fascinating cartoon right there.
[01:22:34] The thing about that is that when you talk about that bandito stereotype,
[01:22:40] it goes around the world and we have, you know, Speedy Gonzalez and a lot of the,
[01:22:44] the imagery there, but a lot of Latinos have embraced it.
[01:22:46] Like throughout Latin America, they love Speedy Gonzalez.
[01:22:50] Freddie, can you show the chair of the screen real quick?
[01:22:53] In Japan, there is Tequila Gundam.
[01:22:57] Wait what?
[01:22:57] I love this.
[01:22:59] Who, so, so this particular Gundam.
[01:23:02] This is not my favorite robot.
[01:23:03] Every, that's what I'm talking about.
[01:23:05] I need to have one.
[01:23:06] Yes.
[01:23:07] There are toys of it.
[01:23:08] So in, in this particular Gundam series, every country in the world has their own
[01:23:13] themed Gundam and this is the Gundam from Mexico.
[01:23:16] I don't even hate it.
[01:23:17] I'm not mad.
[01:23:18] Right?
[01:23:20] That's how I, it's animated.
[01:23:21] Yeah.
[01:23:21] And that's how I feel about Pedro the Peril is that, yes, he's a horrible stereotype,
[01:23:26] but he could have been worse.
[01:23:28] And I feel like there's still stuff you could do with him.
[01:23:30] I feel like you could have some fun with that.
[01:23:31] It's weird, it's weirdly forward thinking.
[01:23:34] Yeah.
[01:23:35] Yeah.
[01:23:35] If only by accident, but yeah.
[01:23:37] 100%.
[01:23:38] I looked up who the creator was.
[01:23:40] It is indeed a white guy.
[01:23:40] All of his other comics were the same kind of art style,
[01:23:43] same kind of humor, but about white guys.
[01:23:45] Thankfully, I didn't find any by him that were of black guys because that would have
[01:23:49] gone exactly where you know it would have gone.
[01:23:53] But, but we talked earlier about DC's first attempt at a Latino hero.
[01:23:58] And it was the whip that I talked about earlier, which, yeah.
[01:24:03] And then you talked about extraƱo and let's get into that.
[01:24:07] What did you want to say about extraƱo?
[01:24:08] It's guys from the 80s at DC.
[01:24:10] ExtraƱo is maybe my favorite iteration, my favorite example of when
[01:24:18] it's the whole, okay, let me back up for a second and I'm going to get a little technical
[01:24:21] here, but I think it's worth it.
[01:24:23] So Stuart Hall was a scholar of cultural studies.
[01:24:27] He's often credited with being one of the founding fathers of cultural studies.
[01:24:31] And so he was a Jamaican born British citizen who was a part of like the new left in Britain
[01:24:39] in like the 1970s and whatnot.
[01:24:41] And so he basically said, as people were, as the former Marxist now neo-Marxists were
[01:24:47] looking at like, well, how does ideology and how do systems of thought inform society?
[01:24:51] He said, well, hey, we should consider race.
[01:24:53] Go figure he was the only black man in the room when he said that and met some resistance.
[01:24:58] But he basically from him and some other people, we get what becomes now like cultural studies,
[01:25:03] right?
[01:25:04] Proper.
[01:25:05] And one of the arguments that he makes is that especially when you're in a diaspora because
[01:25:09] diasporas require or characterized by separation from a homeland and thus some degree of cultural
[01:25:16] knowledge that's lost that you get this situation where the country that you're in
[01:25:23] will sell you your own identity.
[01:25:26] Right?
[01:25:27] So if you are so, for example, if you're Latino and you are from say Mexico or Nicaragua or,
[01:25:32] you know, Andorra's or anywhere else, if you grew up in that environment, you are probably
[01:25:36] consuming media created by people who are at least a part of that group of people,
[01:25:41] broadly speaking.
[01:25:42] Right?
[01:25:42] Obviously there's like social stratification.
[01:25:44] There's different races and ethnicities and, you know,
[01:25:47] I mean, that gets into the whole thing with with novellas and how white novellas are.
[01:25:51] Absolutely.
[01:25:52] And so at least though, in those situations, you have people who are Mexican, who are whatever
[01:25:58] demographic, at least, right?
[01:25:59] Although again, they have their own perspectives when it comes to like who's important, who's not.
[01:26:04] Hall's perspective point was that when you are a part of a diaspora as all of us are
[01:26:10] ostensibly, right, as existing outside of whatever Latin American country we may
[01:26:14] essentially come from, we typically speaking because we exist in the society,
[01:26:19] in this society have our identities constructed and then sold to us by people who are not a part
[01:26:23] of our group.
[01:26:24] And extraƱo is a great example of that because he is, oh geez, he's Brazilian.
[01:26:31] I want to say he's Brazilian.
[01:26:33] And he was introduced as part of a effort to have a bunch of new young heroes.
[01:26:37] And he was the basically the doctor strange of the group.
[01:26:40] So he's literally extraƱo.
[01:26:42] Right.
[01:26:43] So right.
[01:26:43] Strange, right?
[01:26:44] And so he's flamboyant in addition to in addition to being queer coded at the time, right?
[01:26:51] He tells people to call him anti extraƱo.
[01:26:53] Right.
[01:26:55] And also just the visual composition of the character, which also the visual aspect
[01:26:59] does dovetail with the flamboyance often associated with Latinidad.
[01:27:04] In a way that feels like it's attempting to be emasculating, right?
[01:27:08] Although I've never seen a man in a charo suit who felt emasculated by it, right?
[01:27:13] But I mean, that's the whole thing.
[01:27:16] While also like he gets AIDS, he catches HIV from the hemoglobulin.
[01:27:26] Yes, the hemoglobulin whole thing.
[01:27:28] And that's a whole.
[01:27:29] And so they're talking about a minority racialized identity along with the coding
[01:27:36] of a minority sexual identity along with being stigmatized and the ableist perspective
[01:27:42] with a particular disease.
[01:27:44] Right.
[01:27:44] And so this is very much and it was entirely constructed by people who, if the text is evidence,
[01:27:50] have no point of reference for any of this stuff.
[01:27:54] So yeah.
[01:27:55] Yeah.
[01:27:56] And that's the thing is that this was also an attempt not just of having because each of the
[01:28:01] members of the New Guardians were meant to be of different ethnicities and backgrounds,
[01:28:05] much like the giant size X-Men where they're all from different countries, you know?
[01:28:09] But at the same time, this was a time period where you weren't able to have a gay character
[01:28:16] be a gay character in mainstream comics.
[01:28:18] So they made him as gay coded as humanly possible to make him be the gay character,
[01:28:26] which I want to give them a little bit of credit for trying.
[01:28:30] Sure.
[01:28:30] Yeah.
[01:28:30] But having the gay guy literally call himself strange.
[01:28:34] I'm like, hmm.
[01:28:35] And it's also worth noting that the way in which he contracts HIV,
[01:28:39] he was introduced in 1988.
[01:28:40] And I know that because that's the year I was born.
[01:28:42] And so he gets scratched by the hemoglobulin, right?
[01:28:47] And so yeah.
[01:28:49] And there are some letters to the editor that DC printed from men who were identified as gay
[01:28:56] who said like, that's not how this works.
[01:28:58] You're spreading misinformation, right?
[01:29:00] I get that you're trying to do something good, but that's not at all how the transfer
[01:29:04] of HIV operates and you're doing more harm than good.
[01:29:07] And so yeah, like ostensibly was trying to do a good thing.
[01:29:10] This guy is a hero if nothing else, right?
[01:29:13] And again, they brought him back.
[01:29:14] You see here he is the moderate iteration of him.
[01:29:17] He's still, I hate to say the word for him, but like he's gay, but he's not cartoonish.
[01:29:26] He's a bit...
[01:29:26] Do we say tasteful?
[01:29:29] No.
[01:29:29] I just want to say he is what he is.
[01:29:31] He is the kind of person he is as he wants to be,
[01:29:33] but he's not the cartoonish stereotype that somebody who was not gay imagined him as.
[01:29:38] He's not a caricature at least it doesn't appear that way.
[01:29:40] Yeah.
[01:29:41] Yeah.
[01:29:42] So I got to give him credit for that.
[01:29:43] I got to give him credit for that attempt.
[01:29:47] Definitely.
[01:29:48] I mean there's an attempt to for inclusion, right?
[01:29:50] I mean they tried and it feels like, hey, we're only going to get one shot at this.
[01:29:54] Let's throw everything we can imagine.
[01:29:57] And of course...
[01:29:57] Everything, buzzword, every fear.
[01:30:02] That was famously the same comic book that introduced DC's cocaine-powered villain.
[01:30:07] Nice.
[01:30:08] The 80s were a wild time.
[01:30:11] The 80s were a hell of a drug.
[01:30:12] A hell of a drug.
[01:30:13] Well, yeah, it reminds me of, I remember two authors that come to mind and one of them is
[01:30:19] I'm blanking right now although he's one of my favorites, but he wrote Bitter Root.
[01:30:25] David Walker.
[01:30:26] Okay.
[01:30:27] I know I did that earlier with Christopher Priest as one of my favorite writers.
[01:30:29] I couldn't remember his name.
[01:30:31] Actually, and Christopher Priest is the other person.
[01:30:33] I'm thinking that was a David Walker who wrote Luke Cage who did a short run series on him,
[01:30:38] which I really enjoy.
[01:30:40] He talked about how when he was a kid, he saw the early run of heroes for hire
[01:30:46] and he was like, oh cool, a black superhero.
[01:30:48] Why does he talk that way?
[01:30:51] And so there's that question of this does not appear to be a genuine construction
[01:30:56] of a black American character, but it still was like because you have Luke Cage in that way,
[01:31:04] you still have David Walker writing Luke Cage 40 years later in the 2000s.
[01:31:11] And then Chris Priest, I remember reading his remarks on Tony Isabella's Black Lightning.
[01:31:17] And he was saying like, yeah, Tony was trying and it was imperfect and it was a bit earth,
[01:31:24] wind and fire, certainly.
[01:31:25] But at the end of the day, like, yeah, it was a foothold.
[01:31:30] Tony Isabella is kind of like, I was about to say kind of like Chris Claremont,
[01:31:36] but I don't know if that's an insult or a compliment.
[01:31:38] But both of these creators tried really hard to increase representation for groups
[01:31:44] that they were not part of, but who also were not in the writer's room.
[01:31:48] And so Tony Isabella has created a lot of black characters for Marvel and DC
[01:31:52] in the 70s when there were not a lot of black writers.
[01:31:56] So I got he was trying really hard.
[01:31:59] And he stopped the brown bomber from being a thing.
[01:32:02] Oh, yeah.
[01:32:02] That's that's that's worth, you know, commendation, which was it?
[01:32:06] McDuffie or Priest who brought the brown bomber back?
[01:32:08] Yeah, but back to point out how horrible it was.
[01:32:13] Yeah, for anyone who's not familiar, the brown bomber was a character who was it
[01:32:17] was a racist Vietnam veteran.
[01:32:19] So the background is this.
[01:32:22] Marvel had Black Panther and Storm and Luke Cage now, and the DC creators were like, hey,
[01:32:29] why don't we have black characters?
[01:32:31] And for example, Legion of Superheroes, that's in the future, and there were no black people.
[01:32:36] So the artists and the writers wanted to put into black heroes and the editor wouldn't let them
[01:32:39] wouldn't let them.
[01:32:40] And when they would ask why he'd say, Oh, there's a good reason.
[01:32:42] And so finally, the editor came to them and said, OK, here's your black hero.
[01:32:46] And he gave them Tyrock saying every black person on Earth went to another planet because
[01:32:51] they were tired of racism.
[01:32:53] And so Tyrock is from the planet of black earthlings.
[01:32:56] And the writer and the artist did do the comic, but even afterwards they're like,
[01:33:00] I felt dirty having done that comic.
[01:33:02] And then and then there was another character in Legion who was a pharaoh lad who wore
[01:33:05] a mask all the time.
[01:33:06] Well, the writer wanted to have him take off the mask and find out, oh, he's a black guy.
[01:33:09] And the editor put a kibosh on that too and said, you know, we don't do that.
[01:33:13] So finally the writer said, oh, well, he's burned under the helmet and he can't take it off.
[01:33:17] And then and then later on as they wanted to do some black character, I don't know if it's
[01:33:22] that same editor or not.
[01:33:23] But an editor said, well, what if you have a character who's who's a white guy that
[01:33:27] when he says a magic word, he becomes a black guy?
[01:33:30] And Tony Isabella in the room at the time was like, no, and and came up with
[01:33:35] black lightning instead.
[01:33:36] So that happened.
[01:33:37] But Duffy learned about that later and introduced Brown Bomber as the racist
[01:33:43] character that he obviously was.
[01:33:44] Because I don't think the original guy that suggested it thought it was a racist idea.
[01:33:47] He thought it was a great idea.
[01:33:48] Like what if Lois Lane became black for a day?
[01:33:50] Wouldn't that be great?
[01:33:52] As I understand it, the two different racial identities also had different
[01:33:56] consciousnesses, right?
[01:33:57] So well, like I said, the original version never got past the suggestion.
[01:34:01] No, no.
[01:34:01] Yeah.
[01:34:02] But yeah, but in the Dwayne McDuffie one when he turns black, he says,
[01:34:05] now I can say and they're like, no, you better not.
[01:34:08] Yeah.
[01:34:09] Yeah.
[01:34:10] Better not better not.
[01:34:10] But things are moving here at the end, guys.
[01:34:13] We want to talk about we are making changes and Kevin himself is is a part of a,
[01:34:18] I mean, we all are, right?
[01:34:19] We're all trying to make this message to have inclusion presentation the right way.
[01:34:24] You know, and one thing we've been working on and Kevin, you can definitely
[01:34:28] talk a little more about it, but it's your work with Chispa.
[01:34:30] Chispa Comics, which is with Hector Rodriguez, which does the best hero David
[01:34:34] Bowles, which and Frederick Aldama's Gordon book, Henry Barajas,
[01:34:38] but on the modern and Terry Blossom named after Larry Blossom as well.
[01:34:43] The whole point of getting everybody to do that.
[01:34:45] Yeah.
[01:34:46] Gabriel, I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but the whole point of
[01:34:48] Chispa Comics is it's a it's meant to be Latino, Latina, Latene run
[01:34:53] imprint where all the characters are, you know, showing, you know, Latinos,
[01:34:58] Latinas from a different different perspectives and all the creators,
[01:35:01] everybody behind the scenes is also of Latene, you know, background and the big
[01:35:07] the big push we do right now is one called the 13 and it is each of these characters are
[01:35:12] teenagers who have powers that are vaguely inspired by Mesoamerican mythology,
[01:35:18] but the end result is different depending on each character.
[01:35:20] So there some of them are on the nose very much inspired by mythology.
[01:35:24] Others are just like there's something there, but we'll get to it later.
[01:35:27] You know, okay.
[01:35:28] And that's not the same thing as your golden age heroes project.
[01:35:31] No, no, no, that's that's something.
[01:35:33] So here's the thing I wrote the Chispa book over a year ago
[01:35:36] and it got delayed.
[01:35:37] Oh, it didn't get delayed rather, but they rescheduled how it was planned.
[01:35:40] So now it's not supposed to come out till later this year, hopefully.
[01:35:43] And then I also wrote another book about teenage luchadors fighting Mexican folklore creatures
[01:35:49] as it's a children's novel book with pictures in it.
[01:35:52] And they told me that one might publish in April.
[01:35:55] We're now in April and I've yet to hear anything so soon.
[01:35:59] So in the meantime, I was like screw this.
[01:36:01] I'm going to do my own story self published.
[01:36:04] So I did a Kickstarter for World War comics, which is a reexamination of history.
[01:36:09] Now that one representation was important for me,
[01:36:12] but I was also very particular on how representation showed up for each character.
[01:36:16] So I actually don't have any Latino characters in that book.
[01:36:20] But it but but I do have characters that are of
[01:36:23] African descent, Egyptian character.
[01:36:25] I have, you know, there's going to be LGBT characters in there because the idea was
[01:36:30] stuff that would not have gotten shown in the forties.
[01:36:32] But it was still there.
[01:36:34] They just didn't talk about it.
[01:36:35] Right, right.
[01:36:36] OK, that makes sense.
[01:36:37] Yeah.
[01:36:37] It's all about inclusion and representation.
[01:36:39] And I'm excited how we have these books out now.
[01:36:42] And then I'm working on something for the Central American team.
[01:36:46] We also will be from a Salvador.
[01:36:47] So I'll be writing a book from that perspective.
[01:36:50] So I love how much care Hector and David have really taken into choosing the writers
[01:36:56] and really being the fact that because I even called them out on the show like,
[01:36:58] hey, man, you have these Mexican heroes, but there's more Latinos besides Mexico.
[01:37:02] You know what I mean?
[01:37:03] Yeah.
[01:37:03] Yeah.
[01:37:04] And I love that.
[01:37:05] And this is what I like about David and Hector because David's got a long experience as
[01:37:09] a as an academic, but also as a writer.
[01:37:13] And then Hector has got a lot of experience as a teacher like myself,
[01:37:16] but also in indie comics.
[01:37:18] So it's been a lot of fun.
[01:37:20] Been a lot of fun.
[01:37:21] I mean, I want to just give you a moment here, man.
[01:37:24] First of all, thank you for coming on the show.
[01:37:25] I know I've kept you up a little later than maybe expected, but.
[01:37:28] Oh, it's quite all right.
[01:37:30] I had a blast, man.
[01:37:31] I'd love just picking your brain, having conversations.
[01:37:33] I really want to invite you to come back any time.
[01:37:35] Please feel free.
[01:37:36] If you want, we can plan out a four hour deep drive.
[01:37:39] Amen.
[01:37:40] We can do it.
[01:37:40] We can get our Dama on here and go nuts.
[01:37:42] Listen, in the summer, what I ain't got to be up in, you know,
[01:37:46] grading in the next day.
[01:37:52] Yeah, I want to give you a moment, you know,
[01:37:53] just kind of tell people where they can find you or know your socials and kind of
[01:37:56] just what maybe if something you can share that that people can co-find and
[01:38:00] really just kind of support you and what you're doing as well.
[01:38:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:38:03] So if you hear some clicking in the background is because I'm desperately
[01:38:06] trying to find a document that I should plug because I'm a professional
[01:38:11] and that's the thing that professionals do.
[01:38:14] We are all professionals here, wink.
[01:38:16] Yeah.
[01:38:17] We're all adults.
[01:38:18] We're all adults.
[01:38:18] We're all adults too.
[01:38:21] But not at the same time.
[01:38:23] I can do one or the other.
[01:38:24] Yes, I cannot do both.
[01:38:26] No, so I am actually, I'm working on a book on Latentidad and mass media and identity.
[01:38:32] And yeah, so it's been a whole thing and I can't find the stupid title for the book.
[01:38:40] But essentially it's looking at how mass media operates to represent Latentidad in a way that
[01:38:46] we then use for identity construction.
[01:38:48] So like I have a chapter on the news one on film and TV.
[01:38:53] I'm currently writing the one on superheroes in particular and then video games and then
[01:38:58] it's a brief kind of thing, but it's a good way to kind of get a taste for how this stuff operates.
[01:39:03] Right?
[01:39:03] It's kind of a primer if you will.
[01:39:05] And God willing in the Creek Don't Rise I'll have that done in June
[01:39:09] and it'll be out at some point in the future.
[01:39:13] And I would encourage everyone to pirate it shamelessly.
[01:39:15] So unless my publisher is listening in which you're going to call it steal this book.
[01:39:21] Steal this book.
[01:39:23] Right, right, right.
[01:39:25] That system of a down album.
[01:39:28] Oh no, it was a book in the 60s I think called steal this book and that was the idea
[01:39:32] that he was an activist.
[01:39:34] Yeah.
[01:39:36] So system didn't record too.
[01:39:38] They did.
[01:39:38] Yeah.
[01:39:39] So it's probably reference to that book.
[01:39:40] So I do that.
[01:39:42] Abby Hoffman had to look it up.
[01:39:44] Abby Hoffman 1970.
[01:39:46] I'm on TikTok, Instagram and X or Twitter is Twitter at GA crews underscore PhD.
[01:39:54] I have a podcast called Office Hours for Doctor C.
[01:39:57] We're currently in a hiatus at the moment.
[01:40:00] We are my co-author, my co-producer, my co-host and producer, very Thornburg.
[01:40:07] We are doing we've moved to a seasonal way of doing it because you know three years
[01:40:12] of chasing the weekly deadline was making it a little tough.
[01:40:15] Hard man.
[01:40:15] So we are designing, yeah it is tough.
[01:40:18] We are designing a new season based around the theme of death and that kind of thing.
[01:40:24] So and how that shows in up in our pop fiction and what have you.
[01:40:26] I listened to the episodes you did with Dan McClellan is that his name?
[01:40:29] Oh yeah.
[01:40:30] Yeah those are really good episodes.
[01:40:31] I really enjoyed that.
[01:40:32] Yeah.
[01:40:32] And they were about death too actually death of Superman.
[01:40:34] Yeah, yeah the death of Superman right which is where I got introduced to
[01:40:37] Superman comics was actually the reign of the Superman.
[01:40:40] Yeah he's a hoot.
[01:40:42] I would like to have him back on the show for that as well as some other people from that
[01:40:46] from podcast.
[01:40:47] But yeah so that's what I do.
[01:40:50] I write and I teach and I've got some superhero stuff out and about that if you look up
[01:40:55] Gabriel Cruz and superheroes you'll find a couple things.
[01:40:58] I think the last superhero thing that I did was actually published maybe
[01:41:02] two years ago on The Punisher and Masculinbi.
[01:41:08] Since then I've done some other stuff like Disney properties and what have you.
[01:41:12] But yeah.
[01:41:12] And to be clear to all the 14 year olds out there yes he actually does teach
[01:41:16] college classes on media studies that means movies, comic books, all that stuff.
[01:41:20] Oh yeah yeah I teach a class on mass media in society which is what it sounds like.
[01:41:24] I teach another class on diversity and media and my favorite class is American
[01:41:26] Pop Culture because we get to be weird in there.
[01:41:32] So so anyway yeah so that's that's what I do.
[01:41:35] Remember kids if your parents ever tell you reading comic books and playing video games
[01:41:40] won't get you a job I'm in parable proof that they're wrong and don't listen to your parents.
[01:41:44] All right hey I got paid by Disney to read comic books so there you go.
[01:41:49] Yeah yeah yeah every year I think this is the year I'm going to get them my department
[01:41:53] to cover my my Marvel unlimited subscription you know maybe.
[01:41:58] You sneak it into the budget proposal you know just sneak it in there under a pinch.
[01:42:02] It went into it funny when I worked for Marvel I had a free subscription to Marvel Limited
[01:42:06] but to get the free one to work they had to like mess with the system so they they
[01:42:10] had me listed as member since 1961 which I was like cool you know.
[01:42:15] So I've been a member of Marvel unlimited as a one but then there was an error in the
[01:42:18] program and when I tried to contact IT they thought I'd hacked it so they cancelled my
[01:42:22] account and I had to get the editors to go in and tell them to reactivate me.
[01:42:26] Oh no all those points gone.
[01:42:27] I think I see you're the hacker.
[01:42:28] Oh man I'm not that smart.
[01:42:30] Anyways so well yeah and
[01:42:31] if anyone wants I've always I try to check my email regularly it's gacruzphd at gmail.com
[01:42:36] I get questions from time to time and I'm usually happy to respond to them as long as you're not
[01:42:42] threatening to burn down my house which so far only has only happened a couple times on Instagram so.
[01:42:46] What if they invite you to help them burn down somebody else's house?
[01:42:50] It depends.
[01:42:51] Depends for we're burning down.
[01:42:52] It depends right I mean legally no of course not.
[01:42:56] Yes but no there's not any any house that we would want to know of course.
[01:43:01] Nobody's house.
[01:43:02] Nobody's house.
[01:43:02] Nobody's house.
[01:43:02] Nobody's house.
[01:43:03] Nobody's house.
[01:43:04] Anyway.
[01:43:04] He'll do different kind of houses.
[01:43:04] He did.
[01:43:05] White or you know whatever.
[01:43:07] Yeah no it's like you know certainly not Jeff Bezos'
[01:43:10] Yeah and no locations in Florida anyway this has gotten dark so.
[01:43:14] Yes.
[01:43:17] I am also found on tiktok at Kevin Garcia underscore com and I am also on on
[01:43:24] Instagram the same way I'm now on threads there but I don't use it often enough
[01:43:28] but I am on threads Kevin Garcia underscore com.
[01:43:31] I hated Twitter for the longest time and now I feel like I don't have to use it anymore
[01:43:37] so I don't even acknowledge the fact that I had an account.
[01:43:39] You did it.
[01:43:40] I mean yeah I did it so I don't have any worry about it but on tiktok I have now reached 10k
[01:43:48] yeah I'm now past I'm not 11k.
[01:43:49] Finally.
[01:43:50] So I'm so excited.
[01:43:52] I've been trying for a while and and Freddie you've been calling out the primos every
[01:43:56] every episode saying help him get to 10k.
[01:43:58] We did it primos we made it happen from Mr Kevin Garcia to give yourselves a pat in the back
[01:44:03] primos but of course guys you know you guys can follow the show at my primos podcast on all social
[01:44:08] media of course our website myprimospodcast.com check out our reviews our shows and just whatever
[01:44:14] shenanigans we get into and I want to just of course thank you guys for coming on the
[01:44:18] show please feel free to come on man we'll make it happen we can get you David Bowles
[01:44:22] Aldama and Kevin Garcia to go nuts about comics and everything I think you'd love it
[01:44:28] but of course we must remember hey well it'd be fun you could debate or hey maybe you can you
[01:44:33] can coach your friend to come take on Kevin Garcia.
[01:44:37] Listen I'll get my boss on I'll get I'll get Anthony Ramirez on who I think wrote a
[01:44:45] I think his dissertation might have been on Blue Beetle actually not that I think about it
[01:44:49] but yeah so oh I found the name of that book is Latinidad I didn't need information and the mass
[01:44:54] media landscape colon constructing Pocho Villa so anyway Pocho Villa I like that nice I like that
[01:45:03] well we gotta have you back on everyone when we get to read the book and you know go out there
[01:45:06] go steal this book but primos remember we're wrapping up the show here just know you catch us
[01:45:11] here week to week whenever we can do it we're chasing that week to week cycle as well
[01:45:14] but of course as always be most no matter where you're from
[01:45:19] we're up in the most take care
[01:45:44] oh
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