Blue Beetle & DC's New 52: Out of El Chuco and Into the World

It has been several months since DC relaunched its universe with 52 new comics titles. As we speak, several books have been cancelled and several others, less than 6 issues old, are undergoing creative changes. I've only been reading two of the new books, Swamp Thing and Blue Beetle, though I hear great things about Animal Man.

My interest in Blue Beetle stems from my fascination with Watchmen (Night Owl is the analogue for Charlton Comics' Steve Ditko-era Blue Beetle) but intensified when I came to UTEP at right around the same time as the most-recent Blue Beetle, featuring 16 year old Hispanic El Pasoan Jaime Reyes as the eponymous hero, was coming into his own. Alas, Jaime's first series was cancelled after less than 50 issues, but the character was revisited in 2011 in a new Blue Beetle series that is ongoing and not bad.

One of the things that made Jaime's first series so interesting -- and which made it a liability to DC, most likely -- was that it dealt with issues of the Borderland, immigration, and Mexican American life in the American Southwest. Jaime found himself becoming the regional hero for both El Paso and Juarez, MX. One editor has said that DC overestimated the amount of attention Americans were putting on immigration issues at the time and has stated that the first Reyes series was a "gimmick."

I don't buy it. While I do think DC tried to appeal to new, younger, browner demographics with the character, I don't think he is a gimmick, as evidenced by the fact that DC sees him as important enough to keep him around now and in how they built him up as a character on the cartoon Batman: The Brave and The Bold. They know they've created an important property.

Interesting, then, that the series' writer wants to take Jaime away from El Paso and place him in the larger, more "traditionally Euro-Anglo" world of the DCU. Frankly, I think they had to do it because keeping him in El Paso would have meant revisiting the violence in Juarez,MX. A fictional hero has no clout when he's saving lives in funny books while 8 murders a day are taking place in the real world territory he's claiming to protect. And who knows who might have protested the previous Reyes series and for what reasons.

At any rate, CBR has an interview with current Blue Beetle writer Tony Bedard in which he explains plans to move Jaime out of the Sun City and into the world at large. Read it here. Whether DC is asking him to do so to move him further away from real-world local problems and closer to global and galactic fake ones remains unknown.

Image: Are real-world issues boxing in the potential of DC's Hispanic Superhero?

Review of *Mr. Mendoza's Paintbrush* (2010, Cinco Puntos Press)

Luis Alberto Urrea's story of the magical Mr. Mendoza, a leathery ancient in the town of Rosario, MX, who uses his paint brush to inspire, confound, and challenge the morality of the locals, is an example of a graphic novel that represents Mexican/Mexican American writing and artistry at its finest.

The magical realism that permeates and defines so much of Latin American writing is apparent; the mythos of mystery in events and places that otherwise seem mundane is clear; religion and local color folklore entwine throughout the narrative appropriately and without seams, and Christopher Cardinale's artwork is exquisitely palpable.

The woodcut-esque textures and hatches of the drawings don't just offer an aesthetic sensation of "feeling," but an actual sense of touching, of smelling, of hearing and tasting. Everything looks and feels like burlap, like stone, like the skin of the elderly or the smell of fresh milk, or the heat of summer.


One reads this book and its art and has every sense heightened and ever sense of sense stimulated.



But as soon as we are introduced to Rosario's iconic artist and his influence on the two young leads, he leaves everyone, walking on a stairway to the stars, with readers and townsfolk alike left to ponder the components of his pigments, or, if the graffiti on the back end of that mule on the last page is to be heeded, if we've gotten too wrapped up in the telling, fooled by the planted and tilled mysticism of a story with a reality too ordinary to leave alone.





The Kirkus Review has mentioned Mr. Mendoza's Paintbrush as one of the best graphic novels of the year. It's hard to argue against the claim.

Halloween Shout-Outs!

Chris McCay, a longtime friend of mine from my days as editor-in-chief of OutcastStudios.com and their journalism efforts via Comicbookinsider.com and the Outsider Views section of the main site (check them out at the wayback machine at archive.org someday), has published another comic just in time for Halloween.

Offspring is described as a story featuring "a child abandoned who returns home to a world of shadows and blood just in time for a war with her father's greatest nemesis! Will she accept the power that courses through her veins and stand against the creature that attempted to slay her as an infant?" Hey, the title has product tags such as "werewolf," "vampire," and "zombie." What else can you want for late October comics reading?

Learn more here.

Also, if you're in El Paso this Halloween, check out the signing for local studios' graphic novel, Infestacion: The Mythology.

Latino Comics Scholar, Author of _Your Brain on Latino Comics_ Profiled

Thanks to M.R. for sharing this article from the SF Gate/ San Francisco Chronicle. Maybe I'll think about getting Dr. Aldama on campus soon.....

On My To-Read List: New Book on Latino Comics from UT Press

Visit this link to learn more about this title from a professor at The Ohio State University. Books like this, which features scholarship on and interviews with Latino comics figures, are important to my work and to helping the UTEP community see the value in comics scholarship. A text like this should help me as I work to establish both a special collections library of Hispanic Comics Art and as I try to make the case for a Comics Studies Program. And that our flagship institution's press published the book doesn't hurt either. :)