 Good evening. Welcome and good evening. I'm Stephanie LaFroja, senior manager of public programs. Good evening. And it's my pleasure to welcome everybody to tonight's program, Desennial Comics, part of a year long series presented in partnership with the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and supported by the Latino Initiatives Pool administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center. And I'd like to thank Danny Lopez, who is here from the Smithsonian Latino Center for continuing to support this program and for being here with us tonight. We do have a great turnout tonight. We eventually closed registration and the best way to find out about our programs early and to RSVP is to sign up for our newsletter at almostale.org and you'll see a calendar of upcoming programs on the back of your program brochure, including next week's performance by almostale's artist and residence, Larissa Velas Jackson. And of course, continue supporting programs like this by becoming a member of almostale and making programs like this free and available to the public. I think if there was any doubt among us the power of images and the power of comics and cartoons, tragically the events of the last few weeks have underscored that. And tonight we are honored to be in the presence of a group of artists and designers and scholars who's work I think celebrates the differences among us and whose alter egos and superheroes and storylines that they create share their own experiences and tell our stories fearlessly and fiercely, particularly when we're talking about this group of artists. So we're just thrilled to be hearing from them and to be in conversation with them today. And so please allow me to introduce the director of education at Cooper Hewitt, Caroline Payson. Hi, one of the fun things about collaborating as you guys get to be welcomed by people from both museums and I'm delighted to be welcoming you to DeZenio Comics. This is the second in a series, as Stephanie mentioned that's been funded by the Latino initiatives pool at the Smithsonian Latino Center. And it's giving us a wonderful opportunity for the institutions to work together to in ways that are I think are super complimentary. The El Museo has been so outstanding in its work and its commitment to celebrating and promoting the full range of Latino cultures through its collections, its exhibitions, special events and wonderful programs. And we've been able to bring to it Cooper Hewitt's mission which is to educate, inspire and empower people through design. So it's been a great way for us to take advantage of being in the neighborhood together and being within 10 blocks we can bring both of us together. Again, thanks to the Latino initiative pool and to Danny Lopez. We've been thrilled to be able to bring you this program we started off with a DeZenio fashion program. Tomorrow night there's a hands-on workshop led by Phil Jimenez back at Cooper Hewitt. So just several blocks south. It's a wonderful opportunity, a hands-on comic workshop with Phil. Many of these programs will have a hands-on component in addition to a panel. So I invite you to look at our website for that if we still have some spots if you wanna come tomorrow night. And next month we'll be doing one about communication design. I'm also really happy to announce that we found out yesterday that we've been awarded a new grant from the Latino initiatives pool so we can continue this programming for another year. Yes. I also wanna take the opportunity for those of you who aren't too familiar with Cooper Hewitt to let you know that we have recently reopened. We opened on December 12th after a three-year renovation and we've welcomed over 35,000 people through our doors in the month that we've been open and we want you all to be among those guests. So please come down. It's also my pleasure to introduce our moderator for the evening, Alon Stavins. Alon is an essayist, cultural critic and translator and he's the Lewis Seabrig professor in Latin American and Latino culture in Amherst College. In addition to publishing a gazillion books as a translator, cultural criticism, et cetera, my question for him was, why comics? He is someone who's been obsessed with comics since he was a child and in fact his father was a photo novella artist when he was growing up so he comes at this genetically and naturally and obsessively so we're excited to have him be the moderator for our panel and before I turn it over to him completely for those of you who are on social media you can tweet or whatever about us at hashtag New Cooper Q it or hashtag El Museo. This is a wonderful event, it will be broadcast live but it's also gonna be recorded and be on our website so if you want to sort of make people jealous who couldn't come tonight or who got shut out and wanna give them the opportunity to watch this fabulous program, please share. So thank you. It's a thrill to be here, welcome all of you. We're going to have a free flowing conversation with three marvelous artists. I wanna give you a little context for the conversation that we will have and also tell you that what you will see on stage is truly spontaneous. We have deliberately not rehearsed anything, we don't have any preconceived or pre-established questions and the goal is to make you feel hopefully that you are being witness to a kind of coffee between three or four like-minded artists that are exploring their own vision of art the time in which they are historical, autobiographical in which they are creating and the relationship that they have to their respective audiences. Just a few contextual remarks. I was born and raised in Mexico City and if I have a religion was the fact that every weekend I would go to the corner newsstand and having saved a few pesos would buy the comic strips that would be on sale there. There would be of two kinds, the ones that were imported from the United States and translated into Spanish, Archie, Superman, Batman, Spiderman and the other crop, perhaps one that I was more attracted to and that I learned to appreciate even more with the passing of time and that was the type of comics that were natively produced. Caliman, in particular a superhero of Mayan, pre-Columbian descent that for many of us Mexicans at that time growing up in the 70s became an icon, a superhero model of the type of recovery of our national heritage that spoke tons and it wasn't necessarily done in a deliberately proactive political approach. I grew up also reading the classics, the Latin American classics, García Márquez and Borges and Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes and for me the juxtaposition of those two worlds, the novels that were being produced in Latin America and the art that either was being imported or was being generated in our environment ended up producing a fascinating mix. I could see myself often better reflected in better projected in Macondo or in the work by Carlos Fuentes on the exploration of the Mexican psyche than on clearly what was coming from the outside, these comics that I was mentioning that were translated into Spanish. However, there was something in those comics that made us feel Mexican kids part of a global moment. We knew that we were not the only ones reading this episode, that others were if not this exact episodes partaking in the experience of being also followers of Superman or Batman or Archie and so on and so forth. I stress this because the act of reading comics in many ways was an act of being a contemporary with folks that we didn't know and didn't share the same space who lived in another linguistic or cultural habitat but by virtue of the fact that these translations were arriving to us, we felt that we were tenants in the very same structure and that structure unified us. Eventually I made it to the United States. I made it out of Spanish without ever living Spanish out of Mexico without ever abandoning it and inserted myself in this large group that is the Latino or the Hispanic community. When I arrived in the mid-80s, it was still a fragmented disjointed minority that looked at itself not really in a homogenized way but as parallel lines, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans and Dominicans and Cubans. And it was in the 80s and in the 90s when dramatic transformation took place, we became Latinos and that was not done without some discomfort and without some sense of foreignness in alienation. It's not only that we were seen by others outside of our community as different because of the color of our skin or because of the names that we have or the ancestry that we came with but also within our community, we needed to figure out what made us a unified group, what made a Puerto Rican and a Cuban and a Dominican and a Mexican, all part of this abstract, ethereal, evasive category that is Latino or Hispanic. And with that also came the challenge of recognizing our popular culture empathies. Recently, Chespirito died. My father is a soap opera actor in Mexico who did seven or eight episodes of Chespirito as an actor. And I grew up with El Chapulín colorado, with Dr. Chapatin, thinking that that was the Mexican legacy, that that was what made us Mexicans, the fact that we shared those television shows and those icons that came from popular culture. And it was only upon arriving in the United States, in fact, not too far from here in New York City, that I discovered that Chespirito, and Chespirito is just one example, we can put canteen flasks or we can put characters that come like Condorito that unified us and created a sense that we were part of the same group transcending borders. The first moment I would start speaking, people would say, oh, you sound Mexican and because I sounded Mexican, they would say something like, siganme los buenos. And automatically the reference to Chespirito would be a way to connect the person that was in front of me with me, the fact that we had something in common and that commonality was the popular culture item. This is 2015, we are close to 60 million in a country of 350 million people. 60 million, the largest minority in the United States, a minority that sometimes feels as a group, sometimes feels still as a disjointed entity, a minority that experiences life very differently in New York City, in Miami, in Chicago, in Houston, in Los Angeles. A minority that speaks the same language and speaks 60 million different types of Spanish, 60 million different ways of looking at ourselves in dramatic fashion. Popular culture here has defined us and we are defining it in decisive ways. Still there are big questions and big challenges. Let me pose some of the large questions, they connect with the Latino community and they are also questions that deal with us Americans or North Americans or with us citizens of the contemporary world in a large fashion. Why is it that superheroes are so important to culture today? Have superheroes become for us what the gods and myths of ancient Greece were for the population of that time, a kind of pantheon of the males and females with whom we can relate and that push us to become better than we are or in whom we can project our own deficiencies, our own defects, our own assets. How is it that from the 1920s and 30s where comics were seen as dangerous to they comics, comic strips and the characters that they have produced are literally a staple of culture just in general, not only of childhood as we were in the 60s or 70s but of adults, of people of all ages, of all backgrounds, including ethnic and religious backgrounds. To what extent do we get our education today much more from the graphic novel, from comic strips than we do from high brow literature. We, I'm a college professor and we are always battling the fact that our students are arriving without having read or without the disposition of reading 100 years of solitude, 100 years of solitude or a short story by Borges or a play by Calderón de la Barca but they will always be proficient on X-Men or on the most recent TV series on HBO. Do we battle that or are we at a time when we need to accept that in order to understand what the difference between high brow and pop culture is in ways that are unlike what our predecessors have suggested. Why is it that having become the largest minority in this country, it still feels that Latino artists are few, have trouble communicating with a large audience, are seldom recognized and that the infrastructure of the Latino comic industry is not where it should be certainly compared to other minorities like the Jewish minority or the black minority. What is it that we have achieved in the last few years in the last few decades that has allowed us to see things differently? Are we going to a time when we're finally going to be able to define the audience in a way that we were defined by it in the past? Can we get out of the ghetto? The ghetto of being a Latino artist and reaching a wider audience with Latino topics and not sacrificing those Latino topics so that we reach that broader public. What is the dilemma that the Latino artists faces today in different parts of the country? How do we put together the aspects of narrative that come from words with the narrative that come from images and make them come alive? And finally, to what extent is there a Latino comic audience out there in a larger audience that is not defined by ethnicity and this Latino artist can reach it and help that audience become part of the larger mainstream that is America today? Very broad questions. I don't know if we're going to be able to deal with all of these questions but I wanted to give you a sense of context so that the conversation that we will have in just a second has some roots. We have three extraordinary artists. You've been looking at their art on the screen. The art will stop in a few, in a minute or two so that we can concentrate on the actual discussion. I am not going to introduce everyone, the three of them because you have their bios in your program so I ask you to look at that program as we have the conversation to see what these artists have done if you don't know them already. And without further ado, I invite Phil and Wenda and Ivan to come on stage and begin our conversation. Thank you guys. I have to Instagram this, smile. Nice. All right, let's begin. Wenda, let me ask you. You go first. Okay. Could you imagine yourself doing something other than what you do right now? Other than what you do as a career? That's a really easy question. I think I've done everything I could possibly do before my career and I'm really glad that I do what I do now. And why? Because I can create a costume out of bubble wrap and hair and plastic and sit in a gallery and have people feed me granola bars and that's real. I can do that because I can. Why do you like to dress up? Why not? No, I think why do I like to dress up? I've always had a very active imagination. My sisters in the audience, I think she can attest to me being four years old and wearing Wonder Woman underroos that were a little too small, my little belly would stick out and I'd let my hair out and twirl around in my mom's boots and I'm Wanda Woman. I would make my little bracelets out of lined paper. You did the same thing too, right? I would make my bracelets out of loose leaf paper and make my little coronitas and use benches and put it in my hair and I was Wonder Woman in my head and I would play around and as an adult I get to do that for real. Do you remember the first time you read Wonder Woman? Or were you exposed to Wonder Woman? Linda Carter on television, she'd spin around and I just, I loved it, it was nice to see a strong girl, I loved it. I think it's half-naked. Yeah, yeah, gorgeous too, right? No, but that was a big influence for me. It was nice and empowering and enriching for me to see this beautiful woman twirling around and doing all these awesome things and that had a profound effect on Wepa Woman and Chuleta and all these other characters that I get to play and I think without sounding corny it's not work because I get to do what I love and have fun and it doesn't feel like work. Slinging drinks over it and being a bartender and waiting tables, which is what I was doing and everything else, real estate, payroll, all that other miserable stuff, sorry guys. That's work, that's work. What I do is not work, it's fun. Ivan, is it work? What do you do? I still don't figure out what I do. I mean I'm a cartoonist but it's been a long time since I actually put pencil and published something. I mean I'm a teaching artist but that's to pay the bills and I get stuff done, I get grants and this and that. I'm an artist now but I have to really figure out where exactly is my place in the world and what exactly I do. I mean I have a good history, a nice resume and I produce some stuff but now at this age I really, that's my identity, it's like what exactly do I do? Am I a cartoonist? Am I an artist now? Am I just a guy trying to pay my rent on time? And you need to tell yourself I want to be a cartoonist? Or the? I have no choice. It's like there are certain things that you know you are. I mean I knew it when I was young, when I first started scribbling. That this is what you wanted to do? Yeah, I mean my mom tells this terrible story that when I was a baby I would paint with my poo on the TV and it's like. Wow, wow. So I didn't paint with my poo ever since. Ooh. Ooh. But it's something that I just, this has just drive me since I saw the first comic book and I just got obsessed and became a teenager and it was the place where I could hide and be safe and even when I grew up, you know, it was just the comic books were there for me and I wanted to change, I wanted to be in the comics and I wanted to kind of change the way comics were. And why the comics, why were the comics so attractive to you? Why not the novels? Like I was talking about. Well because they were like beautiful, they were big. You know, I was, when I was a kid, you know, a Puerto Rican kid in the South Bronx during the Civil Rights era, there was a lot of stuff going on and it was a safe place to hide. You could read comic books, they'd be like all these big heroes, you know, my sexuality really showed up really early at that time and it was just some places. You know, like Wonder Woman, Supergirl and Batman and Superman, they were safe. They always like be your friends. They didn't care who you were. You know, now when I got older, I realized that those images were perhaps not as innocent as I thought, so I wanted to get into the game too. So there was a time when the, when comics were not considered art, were not seen as a legitimate form. How did we change? What has happened? Is it art now? What you do, you're an artist. I'm a storyteller. When I define myself in terms of what I am, identity hierarchy, it's not necessarily artist or cartoonist, I tell stories for a living. A story that I've told many people, I was having lunch with Diane Nelson as the president of DC Comics. I was telling her that as a child, I had no interest in drawing comics. I wanted to work in museum exhibition and design. Like I loved museums, I loved dioramas, I loved displays of information. I was very, very interested in the way we acquired and processed information. And Diane sort of zeroed in on it. She said, what you were interested in was the stories being told in those caskets, in those cases. And it was really sort of a revelation because that was true. Because people often ask me, how do you like to be identified? I've never been particularly high-minded about what I do. I'm a cartoonist, if I had to label profession, I don't think of what I do as art, although it could be considered art. Which is, I think, the line that we create between high and low art. So I've always been a fan of soap operas and comic books, serialized storytelling, both of which are generally perceived as very low art. But it stuns me those sorts of moments, the gems that come in that low art, primarily because nobody pays attention to it. Or they didn't entail recently. Ultimately, I think I'm a storyteller more than an artist. I think the transformation of our industry comics came when people saw that lots of money could be made. Somehow, I think film gave legitimacy to comics as a medium because suddenly people were impressed by what we did. I do think a lot of people, a lot of people do not work in the way we do. And I think this is true of many freelance professions. Don't think of what we do as work, as a physical exertion worthy of commerce, of pay, because for many people, drawing is a hobby or taking pictures or writing, it seems frivolous and not real in some way. If I have a single barrier that I constantly find myself brushing up against, it's this notion, I was telling them earlier, I work at a studio in my apartment and when I have people over, it's incredibly distracting because I'm working, it's like having people in my office. And yet they're just like, well, don't you just draw? Isn't that just what you do? There's no sense at what I do. Separates. But also it requires thought and solitude. Consideration is a act of physical labor. It can often take me 10 or 12 hours to draw a page. It's just, they just think you whip it up out of your head. So I wanna just stay with you for a second, Phil, and then it might sound like such a simple, even a stupid question, but what is a story? You say I'm a storyteller. What is a story? What is not a story better? When is it that you can have a narrative that doesn't coalesce as a story? What are the ingredients that in your eyes need to come? So this is a way I've been having for the past few years because I am fascinated by stories that affect us. And then the labels we give them, particularly in the age of the internet, we talk about good stories. That was a great movie. That was a terrible movie. Quickly and dismissively, we decide something is excellent or something is poor. And I'm always curious based on what criteria, how are we judging the work? And how are we deciding if it's a good story or bad? The author, Karen Armstrong, who's a religious sort of scholar, like she's kind of like easy religion. But it has sort of a profound effect on the way I view the world. I was talking about story. A story is a narrative, like at least a good story, an effective one is a narrative. Doesn't necessarily have to have a beginning, middle, and end, but has emotional components and well told makes you consider the world in a new way. It makes you see the world in a way, wow, in a way that you have not considered before. And I love that idea. I love that idea that a story well told will make you look at the world in a whole new way. And so for me, that is what story is. It can be a sequence, it can be narrative, it can be, it can have a middle end, like a classic three act structure. I often wonder if a story, a really messy story, i.e. structurally messy, but has profound emotional moments and emotionally connects with the audience. If that is as legitimate or even more legitimate, then a story well told that is structurally sound, but is cold and does not reach an audience. Regardless, my criteria for story, ultimately something usually narrative form that makes me reconsider the world and my role in it. So a story changes you, transforms you as an audience? I believe a long line of the stories that are the most profound are the ones that change you. Wanda, let's, we'll return to that later, but you were talking about the Wonder Woman and I'd like to explore together with you the idea of superheroes having such presence in our society. I had a high brow pretentious, nobby colleague who used to dismiss all superhero related narratives and used to use the word infantilizing to describe us as a society because we're infatuated with it. So let's, you know, I don't want to, he doesn't merit a response. What I, what I would like to- I'll just give shade. What is it that attracts us to superheroes? What is it that attracts us to superheroes? Or you? Me. Why are we so attracted to them? The costumes. Big hair. I think, you know, I'm responding like the, my inner drag queen is responding to that question. I think that's legitimate. Okay. And you know, gosh, what does it attracts me to superheroes? I think, you know, I think the, I don't know what's the little girl in me, maybe the powerless person in me responds to the instant effect that this person has. I don't like this, I'm going to go change it now. Right? And I have the power of the ability to do it where me myself, I'm like, I don't know, well, can I change that? You know, you kind of feel small and instinctive. So it's an illusion. It's an illusion, I guess, in a certain way. And I guess, and I think about the way that has affected me as an artist is that the Chuleta character can say all kinds of things that I probably wouldn't say. Yeah. You know, say it to my colleagues or whatever. But, you know, put on the wig and the doobie pins and all of a sudden I could just, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or, you know, or a weapon woman was able to do that, you know, and have conversations about, or, you know, create these scenarios that address stuff that I really personally, one person, you know, couldn't do, but in this fantasy world, you know, she can take off her earrings and smack you with them and scale walls and do all this other crazy stuff that I couldn't do. And I think that that's the attraction that I have and that I think a lot of other people have is, you know, you insert yourself into this narrative where anything is possible, especially in a very oppressed, urban situation. So in that situation, the one that you were describing growing up, do you think that a Wonder Woman empowered you? You know, it was, there was something very exciting about watching a girl kick guys' butts on TV, you know, with a lasso of truth and, you know, there was something that I really, that really excited me about that. And I think, I gotta think about that for a second as to why, but I think as an adult, we were just talking about this notion of like being an alpha female, you know, and that has to have, has some kind of thing, you know, to me, because Wonder Woman, WEPA Woman, Wonder Woman, if we used to call me Wonder Woman, I was a kid, you know. But I was this chubby little girl, you know what I mean, with big hair and, you know, my hair would stand up, I couldn't get it to be smooth or straight or pretty like the other girls in my mind. So you kind of go to this super powerful, you know, sculpted, voluptuous, you know, vixen who wasn't affected by, you know, your petty small words and they're just, you know, person's swinging, hold your head, you know. That's something that, you know, and also I was the baby sister of seven. So like, yeah, I was a little, I was the little one. You know? Why were you attracted to superheroes? And why are superheroes super? Well, they were just, they were so symbolic, so big. They were like extreme people. They're like extreme women, extreme men. The stories were big, the focus was totally on them and nothing else and stuff like that. It was very attractive that way. You can just kind of focus on these like big characters with big bodies and, you know, beautiful actions and beautiful faces and beautiful capes and they're just extreme in their costume and in their behavior. And it was only later on that I realized that those big things were full of like propaganda and, you know, symbolism was always there but sometimes it was like a genderful symbolism and. When did you figure this out? In high school. Yeah. Because, you know, when you become aware of your, with my first exposure to white folks, when I was in the Bronx, in the sub-browns, you know, we went to the public schools and stuff like that. You had white folks in the neighborhood, there weren't that many. Or the media teachers. The media teachers. Well, except in my school, it was pretty well mixed. We had a lot of blacks and Latino teachers and that was kind of cool. And everything was fine. And when we went to Catholic school, we had the Irish nuns. So we had all of them. And they were powerful people, but until you went to high school and you kind of realized that the images on TV, like all the heroes, how people of color tended to act it on TV and in the stories, how even the Asians were totally invisible except for like the Kung Fu, God bless the Kung Fu movies when they came out. Yes. Because they totally changed my whole way of seeing things because not only was the black and white issue not there because, come on, it was late 60s and the 70s, that was all anyone talked about, the black and white issues, the angry black movies, and then the white folks who were like killing everybody and chopping everybody up. So then we have like these Asian stories and basically it was not about race. It was about heroes and stuff like that. And everyone was the same. So it was kind of pushed all that other crap away and it was kind of like a comic book, except it wasn't all this other stuff looming behind like in DC comics, Wonder Woman, Batman, all those beloved characters were the same type of person. There were no Latinos at all. God bless you and Kenny X, man, right? When it came out. I mean, that was like when Storm and all these people, they're like an international cast and they were very drawn beautifully and powerful and they had accents and it was just like, it was just full of flavor. And then I started realizing that, wow, not only is comic books really unfair before then, but then they seem to kind of just put certain people on the pedestal and then forget about everybody else. So before we go to that, let me ask you, do you think that the different kids of different ethnic or racial backgrounds see comics differently because of those racial or ethnic backgrounds, or comics have a way to make us forget? You guys were talking about escaping from the situation. We, a black kid, a Filipino kid, a Puerto Rican kid, sees, forgets about that and see, or do we see this through the prism of how we're defined by society? I think when you're a little child, when you're a child, you're not aware of what the images are getting and you really hold onto things and you really love these things. You seem to come so precious to you. And the thing with the doll, with the black doll and the white doll and how black children will almost always request a black doll when they have a choice, they go for the white doll. And it's the same thing with the superheroes. We don't even know there's a choice, particularly back then. We didn't know the choice because there was no other choice. And this is the thing that creeps into children. And I see that now when I teach a lot of children and part of my job is to kind of make sure that everything's diverse and they see themselves as heroes too, is that you never consider, I mean, yeah, you can put the cape on and you run around and just snap. But when you get old and your eyes start to open, you never can see yourself in a hero role. You never become a hero. A lot of times you become a victim, but you never become the hero. And that's, I think, the tragedy, at least in my childhood. So are we spoiling the wonder of a five or six year old who is arriving to this without the preconceptions by telling them, look, those heroes don't look like you? Well, you know what? It's better now. So there are heroes that look like them. So they're mixed in. So it's a different, I wouldn't know what their experience is because when I was a child, I didn't get that. But I'm sure that it makes some kind of difference where they see themselves reflected. I just wanted to address that really quickly. I did a panel on diversity in comics a couple of months ago and had two black men talking about representation, visual representation in the medium. And it was very interesting because one really demanded and expected it. The other didn't. Both were from very different regions. One was from LA, Beverly Hills. The other was from the South. And it struck me that where they were from, the socioeconomic class they came from, their ages certainly affected their need for to see themselves visually represented in the medium. And another person chimed in from the audience, who, a black guy who was saying, it's the last thing he wants to worry about while he's reading a comic, is that sort of representation? Partly because of the escapist aspect of it. And this was an African-American member of the audience. Yes, oh yes, yes, yes. Fairly diverse audience and obviously diverse panel. It just struck me that this question about visual representation is very interesting. I'm a white guy, I read as white. So I was represented my whole childhood and never even occurred to me too long for representation. Like I have that privilege. So I'm really fascinated about how that affected others and their need to see themselves projected in the work. The one who did not said something really interesting, he was much more interested in finding characters who had values and ideals that reflected his. Their appearance mattered less than seeing someone who, yes, someone he wanted to be like, not necessarily someone he looked like, if that makes any sense. So I want to push you just a little further and hear your opinion and not the opinion of the audience that was. Oh yeah. So do you think that we, should we have a pantheon of superheroes that reflects the diversity of the audience, the readers of today's United States? And could we reach that point if your answer is yes? In other words, should that diversity be there and given the power structures that the industry has, can we reach that? Well, you know, in force diversity is problematic. What I would say is like creators should have the same chance. You know, Marvel and DC Comics very traditionally been like 99% white, white male. The fact that more people are breaking in little by little is a great thing. But I'm, you know what, I don't like to see, sometimes I don't like to see people from different classes and different races tell stories of characters that I'm very familiar with, like Latino characters and stuff like that. Because sometimes it rings false. I want at least to see, if they were more out there, fine. But the fact that the only certain people get to write these stories and enjoy these stories, that to me is the biggest problem. We get diversity, you know, but a lot of times it's not an authentic diversity. It's artificial. It's like a force, it's like a propaganda. Wanda, what's your take on this? You know, it's funny, I was listening to this idea of forced, what did I just say? Forced diversity? Forced diversity. And I start thinking and I'm going to talk about storytelling and moving beyond the comic. And I'm thinking about this sort of heroism of like contemporary media. And I'm thinking about that show of Jane the Virgin. Oh, it looks like that. And I couldn't stomach it. I couldn't handle it, couldn't handle it at all. And it felt like this spoon-fed Latinidad thing that I really couldn't wrap my mind around. I felt like I could see all the smoke in the mirrors and the strings. And my disbelief was not suspended at all. And I'm looking at it. And I felt mocked, you know what I mean? And as someone who, I love me some satire. I love throwing things in your face. I love playing up stereotypes. I love, and I argue this in my classes when it comes to everything from drawings and mixed media to whatever. I talk about, and I drive this home really hard, you can't argue authenticity. You don't have to like it, but you can't argue if something is true, if you can read something that reads as solid and true. And I looked at it and I was like, I felt sleazy to me and I couldn't get through it. Phil, I wanna ask you something, but before that, let me just say, we're going to, in a few minutes, open this to the audience. And there's gonna be a microphone that is going to be circulating. I ask you if you have a question to, is the microphone gonna come to you or you're gonna come to the microphone? I don't know, you? It will come to you. They will come to you, but we're very much, we're gonna continue the dialogue incorporating some of the questions that you have, but we would like for you to be mindful that other people wanna ask questions and that the conversation here is also going to continue. So Phil, before we go to that, how hard it is it to draw within the parameters of what the industry, the characters, the industry already has? It's very different to draw from scratch. It's creating new characters altogether and doing characters that have been around and you inherit from previous generations. Any thoughts on this? I'm not, like, how difficult is it to? To inherit X-Men or to inherit a Spider-Man and now be the next, I think the most difficult part of it is staying on deadline, not necessarily manufacturing a look. For better or worse, my childhood comic book out of was a man named George Perez who had a fairly representational style. My design sense is still influenced by his. I was a fan and still am of certain mainstream superheroes. I like their look. We were asking earlier about the appeal of superheroes and the X-Men, for example, I've told this story many times, were not appealing to me so much because they were outsiders and because they were the sort of symbol of an oppressed minority, but because they were fabulous because this team of people who looked like drag queens who lived in a mansion in upstate New York, fought crime at Lincoln Center and then flew to outer space like every third issue. I'm like, who, I'll be oppressed if this is my life. I was just like, fantastic. They provided this grand scale of fantasy that I did not have in my little house in Southern California. I was like, that's a life I want to live. I want to put on my thigh high boots and wear a white wig and throw a lightning from my ass, right? Like that's all I gave a shit about. So those characters meant a lot to me. So translating them, my goal, partly because it's simply the way I work and because I feel like I'm borrowing other people's characters. Like I don't have a taste for reinvention in the way I think a lot of folks like Frank Miller do, right, like they're in there and they just want to mess it up. And for me, I know what this character's meant to me. I know what this character's meant symbolically to me. I know how they motivated me when I was a kid. They were so important to me and I believe they can be important to others. So I just sort of feel like I'm a shepherd. I'm not going to screw them up. I'm going to draw them in the sort of way I would draw them normally. Again, sort of Western representational kind of designing. And I'm just going to honor, I feel like the creators before me. I don't have a particular desire also to sort of run rush shot over the folks. Like I have a job and I have these characters because no matter how messed up the creators were before me, they left me these toys. And I see it now as I back away from mainstream comics, other kids pick up the toys and they run with them. And so my approach to them is to honor them in the way I can. And I like the word borrow. He has a very high standard for the comics. I mean, people have to get to his level to be ordered because they're good. Because anything you do in the comic books, people want to see it and it's like so beautifully done. And there's a lot of people who can't get up there. And it's because of you. But yeah. It's a lot. Yeah, but whatever. But I'm slow so they can do it. Like you can still make my job. And see, and the thing, because people have chased me around, I come from an illustration background. I come from a fashion background. And I was taught to mimic a lot of different drawing styles. So although a lot of people kind of equate my work to kind of like a comic format, I actually don't read very many comics. I understand the format and I was taught how to mimic the style. I don't really read them very much. I was like, oh, oh wait. I'm like, wait, DC or Marvel? Which comic? Who's that? Like I'm like, that did see person, right? But I was taught to mimic the style. And I never wanted to sit there and draw a Wonder Woman over and over again. Like I felt like, we already had this conversation. And we've been throwing shade for a while now. So, no, I just, you know, it's funny. I enjoyed my experience with the comics and I have fun looking at the stories. But I felt like, because I wasn't afforded a certain amount of privilege, I felt like I needed to tell my story. And people would say, well, do you want to be a comic artist? Do you want to do this thing? You know, no, I want to tell, oh, I said I wasn't going to hit it. Oops, sorry. That's what I get. It's the line. But I felt that I wanted to tell my story my way. And I wanted to, I wanted the flexibility of being able to move within between mediums, from drawing, to performance art, to this, to that. And, you know, the immediacy of getting the story out there, getting it told in a very direct way where I can, where I have that, that affect what I can feel with the audience, that became much more important to me. I just, oh, just one quick thought on actual process. I do think of myself as kind of a method artist in that, particularly with characters, I kind of need to know them from the inside out. And so I like to get in their heads. Even characters I'm not fond of. So I know artists and writers who will go out of the way to damage, literally in-story characters they don't like or think are stupid. Everyone's character is their favorite character. Every story somebody loves, even if I don't. So it's never my goal to do that. If anything, I would rather learn about them so kind of get in their head, who is this character, what is their identity, like what is their background? Or give them one in, like as a pertain to this panel, many years ago, it was hired to work on like the global guardians, which is DC's international team. And, so, oh, I love those characters, but they were essentially, you know, they were all very one note. And, you know, they were a flag and a name and a superpower. And so the idea was to start investing in them and giving them backstory. If it's Wonder Woman or those characters, or I just did a cover for Orphan Black, which is the TV show, I like to know who these characters are. So that's another way I approach them. One last question before we open it to the audience. And I'd like to get your response. I have done, I'm a person that comes from writing. I don't draw. I don't do cartoons. I have done four graphic novels, and I provide the text in Lalo Alcaraz, the Chicano cartoonist. Together with him we create how the page is going to look. So I'm interested, here we have kind of the word guy and the image guy that come and get together to create the page. I'd like to hear just a few remarks from you on how narrative moves in words, in narrative moves in images, if one comes before the other, if you visualize things first and then put the words, anything you want to say at whatever level on the relationship between word and image. Ivan, what are we starting with you? Well, from my point of view, since I'm a cartoonist, since I do both the words and pictures in my own work, when I write the story for somebody else, I have to do sketches of characters first just to get used to them, like you have to know them, right? So it helps, I've been very lucky that I've worked on books that I can do that, like when I was doing milestone. I'm the reason why they have Latino characters because it was 100% black before that, and before I got that, I started mixing it up for them. And I helped design some of the characters. So I get there and then I'll start, my writing is very simple, is particularly when I know an artist is gonna have it. So I make sure it's very simple, it's like a pound-to-pound script, a few words, just big images, and usually the flow's pretty good that way. Then I go back and add the script on the words and stuff like that. You know, it's interesting, when it's performance-based, usually the narrative comes first, or it'll, like I was selling earlier, there's this, like there was a sentence, or I said, I said for the bargain-basement sovereign, I told somebody, I'm your bargain-basement sovereign, I rule for less. And I said that to someone kind of off the cuff in a very kind of- And that drove you. And then the word, the sentence just haunted me, and then the imagery kind of started to like, well, what does that mean? What does she look like? What does she feel like? What would she smell like? What's her hair like, blah, blah, blah, and then that unfolds. But then some of the WEPA women panels, I'll start with a little bit of a drawing. Like I'll know I want her here or whatever, and I'll have this massive mural space, and I'll just pick a spot on the wall, and I'll look at it and I'll say, talk to me. So you don't know where the story is going at that point? No, and I'll just look at it and I'll be like, all right, talk to me. Like when I was commissioned to do the WEPA women, the very first WEPA women here, there was no sketch. I showed up with my brushes and my pencils and I said, do you trust me? And I sat in the room and I just said, I said, tell me, talk to me. And I let the space, because it was here and in Barrio, in Harlem, and I knew that certain people were gonna be walking through the space. I was like, I need you to tell me what I have to say. But do you control the story as those sketches develop or does the story at some point control you? My life controls the story. Your life, that's good. Yeah, and so the story is like WEPA women has had like six transformations. She's developed like multiple personalities. She's cut her hair, she's slit her eyes and like the weird things have happened. Now she looks like me. When the WEPA women look like this and was like six feet tall and had this long flowing hair, now she's a middle-aged professor in Florida. And she's about to have another psychotic break, I think. I approach everything visually first. I'm an okay writer, but so words tend to come second. It's usually a moment, a visual moment. A friend of mine told me, and I actually, I think I agree that I'm a designer more than even a drawer. Like my drawings are okay, but I'm a really good designer and I see everything in terms of design. And so even as I'm literally, I'm constantly breaking things down into panels and designs. So as I look over the audience, I've sort of framed you in three different ways as if I was, how would I create an establishing shot of this moment in my comic where would I start? It's always visual. I take some pride, I guess, I posted on Facebook recently, I'm well known for all these death scenes in comics. Like I've killed off a lot of characters and part of that, I have to say, is really good framing. So I know emotional beats and I know what to focus on to actually get a rise out of people. And I think that comes not only from design, but being aware and thinking, yeah, just sort of just being aware of how human beings think, how I think, what I respond to emotionally. Ultimately, that's always visual. First question, do you need a microphone? Yes, it's coming to you. It's because we're recording this as well. Oh my goodness. Go ahead. I haven't said anything, right? I'm actually ironically piggybacking on what you've just said, a professor. So as you essentially said, most of the time in the comic industry, more often than not, you have a professional writer that's hired and a professional artist who draws pictures of what the writer has established. Of course, when you get to be on the Phil Jimenez level, then you get to write and draw if you choose to, but usually that's just a separation. My question is, why do the panelists think that, I mean, it's easier to name Hispanic artists, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez or George Perez, et cetera, who have name recognition and kind of can call some degree of shots in the comic industry, but not so much with writers. And so my question is, do you guys have a thought in terms of with the bigger companies, the Marvels, the DCs, what have you, why is it harder for the writers to break in versus the illustrators? Take that, Wanda said she doesn't read comics. I haven't thought about it. I'm a poser totally. One is that art is sort of obvious and quick. Like you can look at a portfolio and be like, oh shit, this guy's amazing or this woman's a really terrific. We need to give them a job. And I find when it comes to art, they care less about where the art comes from. As a matter of fact, we started seeing art farmed out to like the Philippines and Brazil, to studios that can manufacture cheaper. They don't really care. Writing tends to be, I think, that the judgment call made tends to be A, people that the editors know, that they're familiar with, that have established names. It's almost circular. It's in a business of white guys, like the white guys are the ones that are known. What my experience though is, is that also I think because white guys are sort of the default, they're seen as like they're the writers, right? And we're all othered in some way. Whenever we come to that work, especially if we want to address something culturally or ethnically specific, it is seen as coming to it with an agenda. It would be much easier, as a matter of fact, he did for Jeff Johns to introduce Vibe as a Hispanic character with no actual ethnic ties. And it would be even for me because I would be seen as coming to it with a specific agenda. Introducing a gay character. My writer on Angela Karen Gellman was amazing and agreed with me. It's like he can introduce gay characters up with Wazoo. If I do it, it's seen as there's, I'm pushing something. So my sense of it is that, that not only is it a pool, they probably dismiss outright just because of, I'm not gonna say racism, but certainly racialism. But I think anyone that came to that pool would also be, they'd be looking for things in a way that they wouldn't in their own work. I also think that racism was a part of the industry for a very long time. I mean, you have upper middle class white guys hiring other middle class white guys and kind of shutting the door and anyone else trying to get to the door. I mean, it was very hard. I mean, even when Mousetown came on, we broke a lot of barriers. We did gay characters, transgender characters. We had black people with different races, black Latinos, black gay. We just mixed the whole up. We had a lot of really good work. I mean, I would say some of it was really excellent, but we didn't get the attention of let's say somebody in flash, you know, like the best gay friend comes out as gay and gets bashed, you know, like after school story that they always have. And it's because not only does the industry have this kind of like glass ceiling, but the media covering industry has a glass ceiling too. The TV has the glass ceiling, the radio stations, all the magazines, wizard and all kind of stuff. Every once in a while, we get like a little bit of press in here and there. But it's just kind of really hard to kind of break. Plus, you have to be so extreme to get noticed. I think Duane McDuffie was considered the black writer. And then so many people would say, he's black because McDuffie, I thought he was Irish or something like that. And when people started seeing like this giant black guy and stuff like that, they're like, oh, and I think that even him, he created his own industry, created his own comic book company, did all the cartoons. Even he had tough time getting work when he wanted to. So it was just kind of like that. There was a really big glass ceiling. And even today- I remember he got accused unjustly. He brought in Vixen and black lightning to black characters and suddenly it's like, oh, he's making it. Out of the 12 Justice Leagueers, suddenly two are black. And what are you doing? This is madness. Like leave your agenda at home. Like there was still definitely a lot of that. Two quick thoughts related to this. And as we go to the next question, one is the, it would be an interesting parallel or point of comparison to see how this industry does vis-a-vis children's books where you sometimes have the writer that is more important unless the illustrator has already created 30 or 40 or 50 books, at which point that illustrator is seen as having a career. But the author is coming from a different background. And the second thing very quickly, we in Latino literature have been saying that it's not a matter of having new Latino writers. It's that we need new Latino editors and publishers to really consider the fact that you change the industry from within. It's not only the face of it. And that I think applies very, very well to this. You had a question. And the mic is coming to you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Okay, hello, hello. Okay, hi. So first of all, I know that you did some work on the Superboy with the jeans and the T-shirt which was personally before the new 52. Thank you. My adolescent years are very happy. Oh good, okay. But actually my question is in regards, you were mentioning before that there was a time where as far as like the superheroes in the comics books were concerned, they were 90 or 99% predominantly white. I know that based on the comic books that I read and the ones that I got my brothers into that even one of them had come up to me and told me, do you ever find it funny that there seems to be more ethnicity in the villains than there are the heroes? How much do you think that has on a child thinking, you know, is it just easier to be bad than it is to be good? Because my ethnicity is over here. Well, you know what's funny, because I'm even happy to see them as bad guys. It's like, all right, give me some bad guys, sure. And then that will be easier so some of the good guys are in there. And at least I'll have supporting characters that are people of color too. And then we'll be more of a story and stuff like that. So I don't really feel bad. I mean, I think I went on the panel in San Diego and one of the writers, he writes for DC Comics and he was like, I'm scared to write a gay character as a villain. It's like, why not? I mean, he's like, oh, they might think he's like strange or kinky. Look at Batman. I mean, he's the strangest kinkiest guy in the world. Don't worry about it. Put them all out there and let's see what flies, what sticks to the wall. And that, you know, bad guys of color, fine. Okay, as long as they're not the only, you know, people of color in the story. One that you have thoughts on this. Geez, I was thinking about, I was thinking about like how fabulous a gay villain is. Like, I mean, that's just, that's amazing. Hello, right? It's amazing. It's amazing. And then they come to the right. The historic problem, of course, becomes a particularly in comics, superhero comics, not comics as medium representation. So there's nothing inherently wrong with a gay villain or a Latino villain. The problem remains that there's no counterbalance. And so whenever there's an otherness, I think this is a very common idea. Some people accept it, some people don't. Suddenly that person, when you introduce a Latino character, a gay character, even a woman, they become a representative for all. When you have thousands of comic characters and 90% of them are white guys, you can have diversity among the white guys because there's so many to choose from. When there's such a small pocket of characters to choose from representing some other group, the representation becomes more difficult because there are more eyes on it. So your black character becomes the black character and therefore has to represent the 100 million people like black people on the planet or whatever the number is. Same with gay characters, et cetera. So it seems to me that the problem with introducing the problem, quote unquote, with introducing like a Latino or minority villain simply has to do with counterbalance. And are there bunches of other Latino characters who are supporting characters and heroes and kind of villains and whatever? If it's just one more and a swath of characters, that's pretty awesome. I was mortified when I found out, for example, that the new vibe and this character who had originally been created as Puerto Rican was reintroduced as generic Hispanic. He didn't have an ethnicity, very specifically to make him easier to sell to Hollywood. That's my, that's what I... You said that that bothered you? Yes, oh, I was horrified. I was just hearing about it now. I was horrified because I would have to say, and the poor guy that writing it, it's like they're just telling me what to write, you know, sort of like whatever. But I think there was a creative decision, again, to make him as broadly appealing as possible. I... That's so problematic. It's so problematic on so many levels and I think it says a lot about... We had two questions. Yeah, well the microphone reaches there and the one thing I was thinking about is that there were some images flashing of me dressed as Chuleta for that whole Ask Chuleta video suite that I was working on and what people may or may not know. If you know your WEPA woman history, Chuleta was actually the web dynamicist, you know, and I ended up, as I started to develop the characters, and I started to fall in love with Chuleta. Like she just was this misunderstood character for me and I realized that I was... I created her as the antagonist of my story because I was being very judgmental towards my characters and so I treated her very... I was very... I pointed my finger and was very down on her until I started to kind of look at her a little bit differently and then all of a sudden she became my favorite person to work with and WEPA woman became this sort of haughty bitch. You know, I was like, well, why are you so judgmental on this character? And so that's just was my thought, what I was thinking about it. Please. Yeah, I heard that... I've heard the argument that part of the success for Spider-Man was the fact that he had a full mask. So in terms of racial representation, that anybody could imagine themselves as Spider-Man. I wonder how that works with white Peter Parker versus, you know, biracial Miles Morales. Interesting. I love this question, given the fact that we come from a culture where masks play such a role and have played it for a long time. So we are... Maybe the Aztecs were the first to play with superheroes in that sense. Phil, any thoughts on this? I do know, it's mostly statistics, like that Spider-Man is a very easy character for anyone to project on to because you can't see any part of him. What I've been fascinated about, for me, I have many thoughts on it. So one of the things that's interesting to me is the resistance to people. Two Miles Morales is a character which I think is softened over time, but the idea how many people associate whiteness with Spider-Man. So even though they can't see him, they know that he's Peter Parker and when they introduced Miles Morales, the new Spider-Man, it was like, oh my, like, what are you doing? Like, what's up with the race switching, even though it's different, a separate character? And in a lot of the reinvention of these comic characters the past five, 10 years, including Nick Fury, played by some Jackson in the movies, lots and lots of discussion about when you reinvent a character, they have the same name but they look different, usually ethnically different. The resistance I find by mostly white people, some folks of color, to this idea, this very idea that these fictional characters who have transformed over some of them 70 years, who have easily five or six different incarnations, often multiple iterations in different costumes, when you reinvent them with a different skin color, it suddenly is an assault to their mythology, to everything about the core of that character, et cetera. I'm really fascinated by that kind of pushback because it doesn't occur to me. And particularly because like, for example, I think it was in that book Marvel Comics, The Seeker History, people of color were not allowed in comic books. I mean, they were literally, you could not have them in comic books till the late 1960s. So a lot of the introduction of characters of color is in many ways a corrective to 30 plus years of publishing before that, where literally if you colored someone, they would say color them back, like to sort of Caucasian pink or whatever the color was, because they believed that their consumer base was white. Let's also think, oh, go ahead, sorry. The thing about, since Marvel Comics and DC Comics are such a business now, they're just basically a licensee, they don't care if you guys make a profit anymore. So they reinvent themselves every five years, so you get Superman who looks this way, looks that way. The thing that they're doing right now is having these black versions of characters that are already there, America's gonna be Falcon and that kind of stuff. To me, that might be a problem because you're just taking somebody else's story and putting it on a dark face, putting a dark face on it. But there are other things, there's another part of me that says, well, some of these characters are iconic. I can understand Superman, people not wanting him to be black because he represents the man, and the man in this country for many years was the white man. So he's basically the strongest white man in the world. But somebody like the torch, the human torch and the Fantastic Four, I think it was a good idea to make him and Sue Storm black, why not? That's not part of the story. If this was not part of the story, it's who they were, they were brother and sister. That was what's important about them. But I think they copped out when they said, well, you wanna make her adopted. It's like, why don't you just make them both black or the sister? What's the point of that? Why can't Reed fall in love with a black Sue Storm, that kind of stuff? So part of me says, yeah, yeah, yeah. Part of me says, well, you know, we don't have to change other things already so much, let's make our own characters and make them pink. It's been interesting. If I could just say one thing, I just always find that if white is the default color, if there's nothing specific about it, right, right, right, then if Sue's Irishness is not a huge part of her character, then it's game for me. And the interesting thing, just as I say about Captain America, when that character becomes infinitely more interesting to me when you have a person of color and body, a character who has typically been seen as a sort of icon of white maleness, and now it's, that story to me is infinitely more interesting than anything that's ever happened before. The one thing that I find very fascinating, especially because I consider myself an outsider when it comes to the comic world, is the rigor that fans and have. Facebook is like that. Rigger indeed. Yeah, and past that rigor. It's a, you know it's a cartoon, we do know, right? But I mean people hold onto these things in such a steadfast way that there's no fluidity, which is the problem that I have with the art form, which is why I never committed to it because it's not fluid. And what you do see is a response to socio-political things that are occurring and things change in the time and the comics end up reflecting what's happening socially, but not so much, because then you've got the rigorous fanboy that's like, I don't want Superman to be black. Like, why not? It's a cartoon, let go. Two passing thoughts before we go to the, when Arthur Conan Doyle decided that he couldn't handle Sherlock Holmes anymore, he was tired, it was the only thing that people knew about him. He wanted to write others. He killed Sherlock Holmes and the audience was, besides itself, he got death threats. They told him they were going to burn his house and now you can have so many versions of Sherlock Holmes. You need the creator to be dead. The next issue is interesting too is that Annie was just released with the girl being an African-American and it doesn't seem that anybody paid much attention to that fact. Why? They just said it was bad movie. You have to be the author to do this type of thing. But look at what happened. There was a big backlash when I think this target was picked up, the idea of Annie as for their marketing strategies and they put a little white girl in the red dress. It's like, really, Doug? Like, that's just bad, that's bad marketing. We have one more question here. Two more. And then I want to ask you something to wrap things up. I'm sorry. Very fascinating conversation. I want to make an amalgam question from what Mr. Jimenez had mentioned earlier. With the fact that comic books seem to be becoming more popular, the success of films like Guardians of the Galaxy and so forth, it seems that the audience is growing. You guys mentioned the fact that comic books have been taking more seriously now because folks are realizing it's an actual story that's being told. There's pathos, there's parapetite and all that kind of stuff. For you guys as comic book creators, do you think that with the success of films and so forth and comics having a bigger audience now, do you think that there's more pressure on DC, Marvel, image comics and so forth to have more diversity because the audience itself is more diverse? And a quick second part to that question, you guys talked about the fact that, you know, like Miles Morales and now Falcon is now Captain America. This whole idea of legacy heroes being heroes of, becoming heroes of color and so forth, do you, I know you mentioned that it was kind of like something you thought was negative, but at the end of the day, isn't it good to have a generation of ethnic heroes that people like me like to see themselves reflected in? One, I would say, yeah, well, I can actually give you two to answer. So one, the, despite the success of the films, it has not increased numbers in our business. So the folks that generate comics, essentially what we're doing is just keeping IP alive for the films. I find that the pressure to create ethnically diverse or gender diverse characters comes actually, quite frankly, from a place of goodwill from the publishers. I don't know about Warner Brothers or Disney, but it is my experience, typically, that the ones who wanna see it, either wanna see it because it's important to them or they actually think they could make money from it. I mean, on a more cynical, I find the resistance has a lot to do with old schoolers and the sense of if we change this character, we are shrinking fan base while hate it. I forget the second question. I think there's a lot. Oh! The legacy here, quick. I think transforming legacy heroes for the reason you're describing this, that's why it's so important because this generation's changed, and it's just- The public changes. The idea that anyone could be a flash of a Green Lantern or a Wonder Woman, it's awesome to make. I also think that it's not really the market that's changing because, like you said, comics are not really making money in America because they're pricey. They're fighting all this for a little thing like that and they can't play a video game for hours, right? But I think social media did it. I mean, social media is putting a lot of pressure out there. There's YouTube, there's all this stuff like that and people are actually saying things, yeah, behind the safety of the screen, but they're actually saying things and putting people on the spot. I mean, they're putting a lot of people on the spot every time something's changed, particularly racially motivated. It's there, it's glaring there and so many people see it and I think that's a power right there. So I think because of social media, that's the main reason why we have characters of color, a lot more coming on, even though they're still not that greatly done. One more question here. Representing a generation that didn't really grow up on comics, but the animated comics, Young Justice and all of that and Spider-Man and everything, the main characters are still a majority white, but there are some characters from Teen Titans. You had Cyborg who was black and Ultimate Spider-Man, you have White Tigers who's Latina and everything, but younger, I feel like the comic book artists and are trying to diverse the heroes and villains, but they're not being well represented in the animated form or even the movies because let's say in the last X-Men movie, you had all these people of color and then they went and killed it and they're not fully represented. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that? Typical. Yeah, how are you? So my question back would be better representation. What does that mean? What does that mean? So as it pertains to this form, Latino, Chicano, Hispanic, I came here doing all this reading about even just the labels that we use to defy swas of population, right? So that's your representation. Does that mean, again, it's what it looks like, a Hispanic person, whatever that might be. Whatever that means. That has a speak Spanish, whatever version of Spanish that is. Someone that represents a culture, whatever that culture is. So for example, like third and fourth generation Hispanics in the United States tend to identify a far more American than they do Hispanic or even the region that they come from. So suddenly the question becomes what is representation? What are we representing visually? How do we do that? Is it any more brown people? Is it, I mean I have thoughts on it but my question back to you would be what would that be? What does more representation actually look like in media? I think the biggest influence right now in a lot of the cartoons and the stories being told is actually from Japan and at manga. Teen Titans is basically a manga cartoon. The diversity in the cartoons that I have that manga influence tend to be alien, different hair color, different skin color, like blue or purple and stuff like that. And I think that's actually very healthy to see how to put a character there who's not any race that you recognize but still has the other card, you know? And I think it's nice to put the case in that position where this person's the other and I'm part of the main group and I wanna see how they are. That kind of stuff. We're coming to the last part of the program and we have talked about ethnicity and race and in many ways although not involving the word democracy and representation in the role that comics play. We haven't talked for obvious reasons because it doesn't really pertain us here about the issue of religion but religion has been crucial as of late when in connection with comics. And I wanna ask you, I know each of you come from different parts of the industry, have different forms of art, also performative. Would you draw the Prophet Muhammad? Would you draw Jesus? If you had, I wanna see what the limits of representation are here when connected with religion. When I was little, my father was doing theater and he did a play where the Virgin of Guadalupe was invoked in a kind of anti-establishment way and the opposite day jumped on stage and beat the actors and my father was in the hospital for a month. Clearly testing the limits of censorship, testing the limits of expression. We are at a time when those cartoons exemplified the clash of cultures. Your views on this, any way you wanna take that question, and we don't have to talk about the Prophet Muhammad, we can talk about representing Jesus in a particular way that could be a compromise. I don't wanna die but, I don't wanna get shot and stuff like that and understand. You don't wanna get shot. I'm not telling you, please no. But, I understand that when you have created freedom and you're quite too nice like my style, that I tend not to worry about the mainstream so much because I just kind of pump out whatever I need to do. The stuff like Tezuka who used to do like Buddha and all these characters or Jesus. The only thing that stops me from, if I wanna do a story about religion, I'm gonna do a story about religion and I'm even putting this in context of superheroes of horror stories of a novella which that's why I like Jane because of a novella thing. But there's something inside of me as my, I was Catholic, my mother was into Santeria. So it's like, this is really respectful part of me that I'm scared to go certain ways. I will not draw the Virgin Mary too sexy. I used to draw her with boobs up to here but I won't do that anymore because oh my God, it's the Virgin Mary. Unless she's lactating. Unless she's actually in birth. And she did breastfeed, right? But she had to breastfeed. She had to breastfeed, yeah, of course. So that's, and that's part of the context. But you can't really, you know, I mean, I'm just scared to go there. So I'm not supposed to be inflammatory. Is there something? No, that's a very good point. Can I tell you, that is an answer that I probably, it's only a woman. I know man would everything. Oh, okay, like. Well, she's nursing. She's nursing. Of course she's got a large breath. She's nursing. So Wanda, is there something that you wouldn't draw? There's something that I wouldn't draw. You know, I think, I think, I think I would probably shy away from like the religious or the Jesus images because I find them problematic in my, you know, just period. I, you know, as an artist and an art student you grow up looking at, what do you grow up looking at? Churches, pictures of, you know, of Michelangelo, the Sistine Chapel, da, da, da, da. And so I think that those images are, it's, it would be hard for me to draw them without the stain of other artists' mark. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know if I could come to a drawing of Jesus or of Mary without, without the iconic blue, you know, veil with the pink, you know, or, you know, white man Jesus with the blue, the blue flowing hair. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, I'm thinking right now, like a few miles away from my house is the Holy Land experience. Right? And you drive past it on my I-4, the Holy Land experience. And as you're driving past it, you've got big white man Jesus who looks like Kenny Loggins, right? So you've got this big Kenny Loggins guy with his hands out of stretch and his flowing hair and his big goofy smile. And I'm like, that's the ugliest painting I've ever seen. Not because it's not a cognitive painting. And you wouldn't paint me Latino. I don't, because then that, because then that, because what is a Latino? Like, I hate the notion of a pan-Latino identity. I don't look Latina, or do I? I don't know, you know? Or Puerto Rican, or whatever. So it becomes really tricky and it gets into this really weird place where you're gonna get pinned down, no matter what you do, so why bother? Because I, you know, that's just, that becomes a thing for me. Phil? Such on this? I've come to that school thought that religion and culture have been intertwined from literally the beginning of time. They're inseparable, even in our rejection of it. I would, I have no desire to draw on it, mostly because I've understood that it's kind of a offensive thing to do. I'm just going too old. I would get nothing out of it. I'm not sure, I don't have the story to tell. I'm not typically, I'm fascinated by religion because I'm not at all religious. And it doesn't affect me in a way that's other people, but I would not, it just wouldn't occur to me. But now it's making me think, how do I draw Muhammad? How do I make it? Like, do I like the idea that you can't draw Muhammad? It's very disrespectful to draw him? I'm not even challenged by that. I love it, I'm not even challenged. Oh, I do too. I mean, that storytelling is problem solving, right? That's all we're doing is problem solving. Sure, there was a discussion among my fellow instructors at SBA about this thing. And so I was like, oh, how would I draw without seeing anyone off? I'm like, oh my God, like. Someone's always going to get pissed. Right, like, what? Someone's, someone's going to get pissed. And I'm never going to get pissed. And it worries you that somebody would get pissed? I would, yes, because the people getting, because in that case, we're talking about this, right, representation of Muhammad. There's, again, 100 million, a billion people for whom 99.9% of the time would just be offensive for no good reason. Like, what lies? Do I want them to draw a particular image that's super offensive to me? Obviously, you can push boundaries and provoke and all sorts of things, and I encourage it. It's not, that particular image is nothing. Yeah, I think my, I'm nothing if not a provocateur, and I think if I'm going to provoke you, I want a darn good reason to do it. If I'm going to do a Jesus, I'm going to, if I'm going to do a Jesus, I'm going to do a Jesus that's going to do something that's going to provoke something, I'm, like, and I don't know if that's the control freak in me or whatever. I mean, there's a reason why I get behind the, you know, at the easel or I get behind a video camera or something is because I have a particular issue that I'd like to address. And I mean, I've done religious images in the past. I've done the Black Madonna's, I have a triptych of Black Madonna's that I did, and I really just wanted to paint beautiful women that I knew as these Madonna's because you wouldn't ordinarily see Brown Madonna's. Yeah. You know, and I wanted to see these women as Madonna's and that was something that drove me, but that's the reason. I was driven for a particular purpose and I don't like doing things that aren't going to take me where I need to go, you know, or just, and especially sort of antagonizing, getting being antagonized just because, like you said, no good reason. Why? Why do that to yourself? Going back to the Karen Armstrong idea, like every image, so every story, a story can be a single panel, a story can be told in a single image in a comic book, whatever, a film. The idea is that a story will make you think about something in a different way. If I'm not, if I'm not doing that, I'm particularly something as important as religious icon. And why? Like why? Like if I don't have anything to say about it, then I think it's going to make people, like I'm not that profound quite frankly. I'm doing that on my side, like I was saying earlier, watching The View drawing Wonder Woman. It's like, I don't have, I don't come from a place where I think I have the thing that interests me. You know, I just got, I just got a grant to do like a superhero story, but in the context of the Civil Rights and stuff like that. And I'm a little nervous about it because I want to provoke and I want to push and stuff like that. I want to be respectful too. I don't want it to read like an agenda. I want it to read like a real story, real characters and stuff like that. So that's what's most important to read a character, but I really love the idea of the challenge of how do I do certain things in the context of the story and make it real for the characters. Yeah, at the end of the day, it goes right back to authenticity for me. Like the work that Renee Cox did and her portrayal as she put herself as Jesus in her photos, that was a reason for that. There was a provocation in some sort of way that I found exciting and beautiful and challenging and that's where I'd want to go because it's going to bring some kind of valid conversation. But just to do it, just to do it. Authenticity and clarity and the purpose of storytelling and also the courage to tell the story. You guys have been terrific. Thank you so much. This is a fun panel. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Rach. This is fun. Oh, guys, there's some kind of bits in the back there. They go free to the first few people who get them.