Into the COLA-verse: Office Hours Session II: Why Comics Matter

[00:00:00] Dan: Hi, and welcome to Into the Colaverse Office Hours, an open forum podcast that takes us deep into the minds and work of our faculty here at the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin.

[00:00:14] Frederick: Join us your hosts, Frederick Luis Aldama and Daniel Oppenheimer as we learn of the many issues discussed and deliberated by our cutting edge faculty who are transforming the world today.

[00:00:30] Dan: Hello everyone. I’m Dan Oppenheimer, director of public affairs for the college of liberal arts. And welcome to today’s alumni book event free featuring Frederick Luis Aldama and his new comic book series Pyroclast. Frederick is the Jacob and Francis Sanger Mosker chair in the humanities at UT Austin.

Also the founder and director of the Latinx pop lab and the annual BIPOC pop comics, gaming, and animation arts expo and symposium. His superhero name is professor Latinx. Uh, you’ll have to tell me after this talk how I can get my own superhero name, Frederick. Um, he is an award winning author, co author, editor, and co editor of dozens of books and the editor of numerous book series.

He’s the producer and co creator of the first documentary on Latinx comic book superheroes. He’s been inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. The National Cartoonist Society and the Ohio State University’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion Hall of Fame. And forthcoming works of his, in addition to this comic, include his novel, The Absolute, Absolutely Almost True Adventures of Max Rodriguez, the graphic novel, Labyrinth Spawn, and the comic book series, The Steampunkera Chronicles.

He’s also the host of our in house podcast, Into the Coliverse, in which he talks to his faculty colleagues about their lives and work. So, Frederic, thank you for being here, thank you for doing this, congratulations on this book and the others. I want to start with a little bit of your origin story, relative to comics, before we get to Pyroclast.

So tell us how you first got interested in comic books, and how you became a scholar of them, um, and then obviously, ultimately, a creator of them. But, but, you know, what’s your comic book origin

[00:02:16] Frederick: story? Yeah, thanks, Dan. So, origin story, I was born in Mexico City, and, um, things didn’t work out there with my dad, so my mom threw us on a bus, brought us to California, and at that point, my maternal tongue was Spanish, but the School teachers didn’t want us to speak that dirty Mexican, uh, in the classrooms.

And so, didn’t feel like literacy in the school environment was something I wanted to, you know, that was welcoming. But luckily, there was a little store, a little tienda at the corner of our street, and there was a spin rack, and the… The shop owner was really sweet and would let me just basically after school, I would go there and I would sit with the latest, you know, fantastic four X Men comics, um, um, you know, whatever was dropping and that’s, that became like matching images with words, basically my school.

And. There was also something else really cool happening in that space, which is that, you know, I got to see characters that were, um, either kind of the rejects that were, had a safe space like Professor X’s mansion, um, where they could, you know, really develop their full potentialities, but also those who, you know, like, um, the thing who basically, you know, um, impenetrable to like bullying and stuff like that.

So it was for me, comics, especially superhero comics is very much a part of my own origin story. And it took me, you know, um, I read them like mad as a kid, um, in high school. I continued reading them, but less so because, you know, the, you know, high school gets busy. And then I found my way back to them in college with Love and Rockets, the bros Hernandez, very much the kind of, uh, pioneers or some of the pioneers of what we call alternative comics, which came out of underground comics.

And, found my way back to them, but I knew once I was in a PhD, so that was at Berkeley when I was in my PhD program at Stanford, which was literature, but a lot of cognitive science, um, that eventually I would want to come back to comics, but I was pretty much told, look, at this point, you can’t write a dissertation on comics, um, do that later.

So luckily I spun through the early sort of phases of. You know, promotion and tenure. Um, by my fourth year as a professor, I was a full professor and I was able to then turn my attention to the thing that I had wanted to do for the longest time. And I wrote what became your brain on Latino comics, my first book in that area.

So. There you go. And now I just finished teaching my intro to comics studies class, um, here at UT with undergrads and it was, they were just like, amazing. I love my students and we, I took them on this incredible journey. Both learning history, but also learning conceptual tools learning all the kinds of ways that comics tell stories visually and verbally but where the visual is the dominant and Then the other class that I just finished teaching which also includes some comics Smartphone storytelling and wellness.

There you go.

[00:05:54] Dan: One thing I was thinking as you were talking was You know, when you were growing up, you, you sort of gobbled up the comics which were on offer, which were the ones, you know, whatever, Spider Man, Fantastic Four, I don’t know what, Superman, Batman, whatever, you know, and, and it, and, and it, and there wasn’t a sort of, I’m not sure, I guess my question is, was there a Latino comic book or comic character or, That you even read when you were younger?

Or was it kind of older? And then I guess more broadly, like, what is the canon? I mean, you don’t literally have to go through it all. Or has part of your career as a scholar been, a scholar and somebody who’s involved in the industry, been essentially drawing the lines around things to sort of create a tradition, and then obviously at this point sort of trying to extend

[00:06:42] Frederick: it.

Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. That’s a great question, Dan. So part of my scholarship is, um, archival and that might seem to sound a little strange, but it’s a kind of living, breathing archive, which is what comics is. My book that I won an Eisner for is called Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. And that was really going back into the archive and making visible, um, not a huge presence, but a significant.

While small, still significant presence of Latino, Latine, Latinx comic book superheroes all the way back to Zorro, actually. So, you know, we have to think about, um, a lot of people forget that Zorro was actually based on Joaquin Murrieta, uh, one of our 19th century, like, you know, superhero bandits who stole from the rich to give to the poor.

Um, And that Zorro was the inspiration for Batman, just there you go. So, you know, already, you know, we have to kind of think about, yeah, looking to places that haven’t been looked to in the past to actually see our significant presence, even if it’s been a shadowed presence. Now, as far as me as a kid, we had El Dorado, which was on Super Friends, a cartoon, which was a kind of mishmash of all sorts of stuff, which was pretty typical of representation and unfortunately still typical of representation, so that you have symbol, symbologies and mytholo mythological signs or icons.

Taken from Peru and from Mexico and from God knows where you throw them all on to this superhero and suddenly he’s like the Latino right, without any idea that they all have their very set their separate traditions, cultures, etc. But Eldorado and then of course, White Tiger, White Tiger, George Perez, arguably, early.

Still to today, one of the most complex, rich, and exciting visually, Latino, Latinx superheroes ever created. When was that? When was, was, when was… That was in mid 70s, so, and he was in the, in the, um… the deadly hands of kung fu stuff is where he appeared and then he finally started to get his own space as a superhero but um yeah so we’re talking yeah just to give us some context mid 70s i came to white tiger through an uncle and i was a little bit Older, I was already pushing 10 11.

But yeah, white tiger definitely struck me. He’s Afro Latino and proud. He’s boricua, you know, Puerto Rican Latino, and he’s got an Afro, and he’s like, super grounded. He’s super smart. He’s got it. Higher, you know, advanced degrees and everything, right? And, and yet he’s very, still very street. So, like, they, with White Tiger, did everything right.

Now, that isn’t to say that… Who was

[00:10:05] Dan: the, sorry, who was the they in that case? Is that one of the, is that Marvel or DC? Or is that some

[00:10:10] Frederick: independent publisher? No, no, that’s Marvel, and that was George Perez. And, in fact, it was his kind of, um, the person that was helming that series, Marv Wolfman, was like, I’m going to give this to you, but you’ve got to, like, sharpen your visual storytelling skills and come back and let’s get, do this.

And in fact, that’s what actually happened. And it created, yeah, the, one of the most significant. Superheroes in the now DC Marvel, of course, you get people into that conversation. That’s a whole other rabbit hole. Right? Um, and you know, I’m Marvel. I’m DC, you know, that kind of stuff, but we can we can go there if you want.

[00:10:52] Dan: I have a, well, I have a, sort of a, it’s not so much that, I guess one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking about, you know, that he was a sort of politically self conscious character is, and I don’t know this, you know, people talk about, say, Star Trek, for instance, as being a franchise that, that, for its time, historically has been, was pretty progressive, so even if we can look back and things and, You know, in the Star Trek canon and when it’s a little bit, there’s a sort of awareness that they were trying to do things that were politically progressive time.

Is that true of comics as well? Like was Marvel comics or DC comics, were they pretty good for their time or were they more sort of comparable to sort of, let’s say the general entertainment industry? Which, you know, wasn’t, wasn’t anything special, sort of, in two or three moments, but wasn’t, sort of, more broadly a kind of force for political…

[00:11:47] Frederick: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, no, I think, that’s a really good question, Dan. You know, one thing that I learned with Latinx superheroes in mainstream comics, and the archival work, and the kind of scholarship that, you know, I put into that, is we want to hope that there is a kind of… Forward trajectory of or teleology, if you want to use a fancy word of like improvement, um, it’s actually not really that’s the story.

Isn’t that? It’s a story with ruptures of like, incredibleness, like. White Tiger. Um, but then it’s also filled with like a character, also Marvel Firebird, who may be on the, at first glance is an interesting Latina superhero, social worker by day, Firebird superhero by, um, you know, by, well, you know, by night.

Um, and, um, there’s some complexity, some backstory, but in the end, it’s interesting. Usually, the Latinos end up being, honestly, like, the janitors cleaning up, um, doing all the work and doing all the cleanup, and the white superheroes, um, you know, for decades would be the ones that would get the credit. And I’m literally, like, plots that do that.

[00:13:14] Dan: Yeah. You mean where there’s like, this person is a superhero. But they’re kind of support staff superhero or something like that. Okay.

[00:13:23] Frederick: Um, and then, you know, you do have the, like, what you’re doing kind of, like, stuff. Right. And you know, it’s like, it’s obvious, we know this with TV today, TV yesterday, film today, film yesterday, pop culture, storytelling spaces, like, get the writers in the writing room that know this stuff, that have, like, live and breathe it, that, you know, I mean, it’s obvious, right?

You know, it’s like Coco, when Coco, when they were doing that, and, um, you know, I share this story a lot because I think it’s emblematic. They, first of all, Disney tried to trademark. Day of the Dead. Mm-Hmm. . And, you know, we were, all of us. Like what? And then one of my friends, Lalo Raz, who’s a political satirical cartoonist in la um, got talking.

Just, it

[00:14:11] Dan: took me a second to lock in. Coco was that film that came out a few years ago, right? That was

[00:14:15] Frederick: the Disney, yeah. Coco’s huge, huge hit. He goes into, goes

[00:14:18] Dan: into the realm of the dead and, yeah. Mm-Hmm. .

[00:14:21] Frederick: Yeah, it could have gone so wrong, like their storyboard that I was privy to seeing had all sorts of like, um, glitches in terms of cultural Latino cultural representation.

So luckily they pulled in, you know, some of us, Lalo especially, and brought us into consult and we’re like, what? No, we wouldn’t. Our grandma’s not throwing a spoon at Miguelito. They’re throwing a sandal. That’s what they do in our families. Just little things. So, so anyway, back to your point, which is, it’s not a theory.

It’s not, we can’t, you know, we can’t think of it as like, um, a history of progress and getting better. We can think of it as like these ruptures.

[00:15:11] Dan: So, I mean, I want to get to, so, so now let’s get to kind of… The origin story for Pyroclast, and then this larger series of which is a part, but I don’t mean literally, we’ll get to like what literally the character story is, but what is the backstory on how this comic universe came into existence, sort of, professionally, industry wise?

Yeah.

[00:15:32] Frederick: Yeah, no, thanks, Dan, because it is important, and it relates exactly to what we were just talking, um, getting Latinos in the writing room, you know, Latine, Latinx, in the writing room, getting them to, Um, do this does actual visuals on these right? Um, um, both so both storytelling visually and verbally Um, so chispa is a imprint Of scout comics, which is a big Comic book.

It’s not DC Marvel, but it’s big, you know, and they, two friends of mine, David and Hector, um, created Chizpa Comics with the idea precisely to open a space for us to get our stories, our superhero stories, um, our genre kind of, um, comic stories out there. And the idea behind Pyroclast is that he’s the second of 13 Mexican American teens, um, born all across the U.

S. over a two week period who begin to exhibit superpowers, and as they grapple with these new abilities, they’re contacted by, um, this figure, Father Tonal, who’s in Texas, and he runs According to the 13, a Catholic college, best in the nation, um, and all 13 receive a scholarship to go there. Um, so my number two of the 13, Pyroclast, um, is also importantly that each one is born during the beginning of what is What we kind of go back in history to the sacred, the last sacred Mesoamerican cycle of 52 days, where unless balance is restored, according to the, to that calendar, um, chaos, and, uh, there will be chaos and chaos, basically in conflict with the world, right?

And with order, and so their powers, Pyroclast included, um, is linked to it. His indigenous astrological sign according to the calendar. Um, and so, yes, there’s. Not only getting it right in terms of like Latinx culture and life and family and trying to get all of our different stories about in and around that out there, but very, um, say color conscious writing with a depth that links to a different mythology than say the Norse mythology of Thor and Loki or the Greek mythologies that You know, underpin much of the rest of, like, the kind of MCU and so on.

Um, now, did you want me to take a pause before I jump in to talk

about

[00:18:38] Frederick: Pyroclast? Yeah, I, yes, because,

[00:18:42] Dan: um, I wanted to ask about that. It’s because it’s not just the location in a mythology, it’s sort of a creation of a mythology, right? It’s a selection of, and this is true with how Marvel used Norse mythology, you know, all the way to thinking about Black Panther and, you know, this fictional…

country of Wakanda, which is a melange of sort of science fictional elements, and then certain elements from, I think, different African cultures. And so that’s a complicated, interesting. So were you involved in the Sort of creation of this larger mythology that underlies this whole universe Where you sort of handed the sort of elements of that and then from that you kind of may had made choices about What pyroclast story would be and how do you cut the creation of a new mythology?

But that’s rooted in an existing mythology because

[00:19:38] Frederick: there’s no making. Yeah. Yeah, good question So, you know this in a way is The Chispa verse is a kind of a Marvel, um, factory style operation in that Hector and David, um, lay a Outline, very kind of, um, light outline for the building up of, you know, what will become the Chispaverse and then each one of us participating and creating, um, our respective superheroes can, um, interpret and, um, Develop, you know, where we’re going to go with that with so, but with this light outline in place, I knew that Pete Lumet us, his thing was that he could, you know, turn some somehow turned a stone or harden his epidermal layer was going to harden for me.

That’s how I was going to do it. And not only because of my love of the thing, Ben Grimm, but also because it worked really well with, um, you know, his particular symbol, which is the sort of the chispa, the spark when you, um, when you strike arms, you know, when you strike two things together. And so, yeah, so Pyroclast very much linked to that symbol, but then me, um, you know, working, you know, in conversation with David and Hector, just like they do, did at Marvel, like with Stan Lee and Kirby, okay, sounds good, go do it.

Yep,

[00:21:22] Dan: yep. Or you need to tweak this a little bit, so it fits with this, and, and, and… Yeah, it’s interesting, because I was gonna say, when you’re thinking about the creation of mythology, you’re also obviously drawing on existing comic book mythology, right? So, Pyroclast looks like the thing, and you can correct me, because you go a lot deeper on this stuff than I do, but like…

At first glance, he looks like the thing. You’re talking about this university, this Catholic college, which of course reminds me of, uh, what is it, Professor X’s school for gifted, what is it, gifted youngsters or something like that. That’s, I mean, and that’s, I’m sure, drawing on previous, you know, narratives about special academies for, you know, gifted people and things like that.

So it’s also bringing in the existing… More familiar comic book mythology that kind of at this point all of us know, I mean, I’m sure I had the experience and you’ve had the experience, which is when we were growing up and we were comic book nerds, it felt like something that, like, we knew and other kids knew, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t the lingua franca of American culture.

And now, of course, it is, right? Now we all read the comic books, and that is almost American pop culture in some sense. So you’re drawing on that, and you’re trying to plug into that as

well,

[00:22:34] Frederick: I assume. Yeah, definitely. And remember, too, that, um, you know, that Professor X, which, um, It’s funny, just really quickly, that’s where Professor Latinx comes from, my nickname in the comics community, because all the Latinx creatives were at a certain point like, Talk to Fred!

Oh, Fred knows everyone! He knows like, where we all are on the planet. So, and then, someone created one of my, Um, one of the comics creators created me with a cerebro, um, and professor, and professor, you’re zooming

[00:23:08] Dan: in, seeing all the Latino comic creators and that the new talents who barely emerged yet.

[00:23:14] Frederick: Yeah. Some little bit of, yeah, absolutely. And of course, remember X Men really is, um, kind of comes into its own. And is speaking to and res in resonate, resonating with, um, you know, really important, um, like moments in civil rights, brown, uh, power movements, black power movements, et cetera. So, you know, for, you know, the college, Catholic college, the, you know, professor X mansion, you know, these are safe.

Spaces for learning and realizing the full potentialities of those who have otherwise been, you know, either not seen or patrolled and surveillance and disallowed from, you know, the access to all of their, you know, possible ways that they can flourish in the world.

[00:24:13] Dan: Well, and it occurs to me, as you’re talking, it’s also when you’re, when you’re thinking about just the real world counterparts with civil rights.

Part of it is not just when we’re, we’re thinking about how the dominant culture, the white culture treated, you know, people of other races, ethnicities. Part of it is a sort of contempt, but part of it is a fear, right? Is a fear of imagined power, uh, which is, corresponds to these oppressed. But also profoundly powerful mutants in the X Men, in all of the X Men narratives.

Uh, yeah. And of course, in that sense, the power is literal. In the real sense, the power is a kind of often fear of some sort of, um, fear of retribution or something like that, or sexual power, or all of these things that are sort of projections of white fears rather than necessarily any reality in these communities, but there’s Yeah.

Thank you. really strong correspondences between these different

[00:25:15] Frederick: things. Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, we need, we need our superheroes more than ever now. I do understand. That there’s a certain, um, I would, I would actually say, call it MCU or Marvel Cinematic Universe fatigue, not superhero universe, you know, superhero fatigue.

Um, and I think a lot of that, I mean, that’s another rabbit hole, but I think a lot of that is, um, um, just kind of formulaic storytelling and also excessive use of CGI. I think we’re just, we, we want, we want our superheroes. We need our superheroes and we will always like want that kind of wish fulfillment possibility in our lives.

Um, and so that’s why comics in the way that comics can really be exploratory and innovative storytelling will be, you know, will nourish our souls. But, um, um, so yeah, so don’t be fooled. By like the fatigue, it’s not really it’s that’s not superheroes in the way that we Dan and I and others are thinking about superheroes.

So

[00:26:28] Dan: let’s get to pyroclast. What’s his

[00:26:30] Frederick: story? So yeah pyroclast And you know, uh dan and others who write fiction You know, there’s a There’s bits of us in everything that we write, and there’s a lot of bits of me in Pete Loumeras, who is, now I was not a popular football quarterback, he is, um, but I did live in a small town in California that I call Nowheresville, basically, and some of my other stuff.

Um, but here I call it San Sebastián, and there is a very specific reason for it being called San Sebastián. San Sebastián is actually the patron saint, informal patron saint, of, um, uh, gay, uh, you know, LGBTQ folks, um. You know, his sacrifice is depicted with the arrows going. Yeah. Yeah. Hitting him at various points.

Yeah. Um, he’s Irish Mexican and like me and, um, yeah, he’s likes working. He’s like, you know, his origin story, he’s like super popular, but doesn’t care. Um, he like, he loves working on his. Triumph motorbike with whatever spare parts he can afford. He listens to his, even though it’s contemporary, he listens to some of my favorites, you know, in the nineties, like Jane’s Addiction and Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden.

Um, so he’s like, You know, he’s part me and he’s part, like, wish fulfillment me, right? Yeah. Um, I was the last kid picked for any sports, right? Take all Dama if you wanna lose, right? Um, so, he’s got a, he’s got a little sister, um, sassy, smart, super, like, politicized. Um, the… You know, he’s living with his deal, George or Jorge, who’s a local librarian, um, more closer to say my age range.

Um, and what’s, you know, so he’s got a full life. He’s got a full, full life. He, he. He’s, um, he struggles though, like all of our, like we do, like teenagers today do struggles with things that he can’t quite articulate. He’s struggling with his own desires. Um, not in an angsty, super angsty way, but kind of not sure, tries dating a girl, doesn’t really quite work, doesn’t know what to do with that.

Um, you know, he defends someone that he meets, you know, sees being bullied and realizes that there’s actually something more there about that. So the kinds of things that in that really important time of our lives. But you know, when we’re teenagers, when we’re struggling to identify, even for ourselves, a lot of the stuff that’s going on, that’s what’s going on underneath.

And of course, right. You know, it starts to, he’s, you know, it’s, it’s his birthday and it’s his time to kind of come into the superpower. And he starts, instead of it being like inside and he can’t figure it out, it starts to, he starts to get this rash and the rash starts to harden and inch by inch becomes this rock hard, crusted epidural layer.

And he’s like, what is going on? And he learned some of his backstory from his uncle and, you know, what happened to the mom that’s, you know, wasn’t able to be there, you know, um, Uh, you know, as he grew up, he

[00:30:22] Dan: was conceived in virgin superhero

[00:30:25] Frederick: birth, right? Yes. So like Wonder Woman in a way, right? But so I’m pulling from DC even though I’m more of a Marvel guy.

Um, but yeah, so he learns that There’s a curandera, actually a curandero, uh, in the, in his, before he was born that the mother went to, um, because she wanted a child and basically shaped, molded. Um, you know, this, you know, this, um, Pete from volcanic heat and from Mexican obsidian and earth and clay. So, yeah, there’s, I love it.

I don’t know. I’m loving it. Can you talk about,

[00:31:05] Dan: Frederic, one of the things that comes up, and I’m curious how much of this was your invention, how much of this was rooted in the kind of framework mythology they gave you. You talk about him as having two spirits. And that’s both a sort of mythological, comic mythological reference in terms of where his powers come from, but I think that’s also a reference to his sexuality and, uh, kind of concept of gender that’s, that’s a real thing.

Can you talk about that? Sort of

[00:31:34] Frederick: connect those two? Yeah, so, thanks for bringing that up. So, like I said, like, if we think of Hector and David, who are the editors of Chispa Comics as Stanley and Jack Kirby. Here’s an idea, all right, Aldama, go. We trust that you’re gonna build a story world that’s gonna, like, grow from this, and with your artists, you’re gonna do something cool.

So, that’s what I did. You know, every, this, everything is pretty much my story world building with, um, Guillermo, the, um, artist, and this includes the backstory of the curandero, who is a two spirit, and also the, the beginning of the kind of characterizing the building of Pete, which is, This is him, by the way, um, learning with Pisteo George how to control his, his, um, his power, right?

His… This deep internal stuff that he hasn’t been able to figure out and to focus it and to use it in a way, right, as a superpower. Um, right, yeah, here, and that’s his tech, tech up bottle, this, um, double sorted. Um, cited, uh, tech bottle of double sided. Um, and this is also rooted in Mesoamerican warrior cultures.

So the tech bottle, which is this really awesome, you know, um, double sided. What knife, if you will, I’m learning how to control that learning, you know, but there’s still a lot that he needs to kind of his journey is just beginning his journey, um, to spirit the two spirit traditionally, both in, you know, Mesoamerican indigenous cultures, North American Indian cultures, and they’re everywhere in the world.

Cultures, um, were the kind of. Um, the revered, uh, kind of shaman, uh, figures, the ones that were the healers and the storytellers and they were gender fluid. They didn’t identify one way or the other. And, you know, I think Pete’s, you know, kind of in that space right now. And I think it’s a good space to be in.

And it’s also, you know, good for. Readers of this comics not, not only to see Pete and to maybe see themselves as a Latino superhero dealing with all of these internal, um, struggles and kind of figuring out how we might, I don’t know, express them, um, but also those internal struggles, you know, being, you know, struggles around issues of sexuality and gender.

[00:34:31] Dan: You’d mentioned earlier the kind of exhaustion of the, uh, comic book movie industry. I think notably, in particular, Marvel’s had a few flops in a row. Or, if not quite flops, not staggering successes. How is the comic book industry itself doing right now? I’m so far out of the loop. I grew up doing this. You did, which is you get that, you know, once a month, the new issue arrives, you pay a buck or a buck 25 for it or something like that.

Does that still exist in a sort of healthy way? Are people reading the paper editions? Are they reading them on their, you know, iPad? Are there other things going on that I’m not aware of? You know, who, where is the comic book industry or is it all graphic novels, one off graphic novels? Like what’s going on?

What industry are you guys trying to plug into in a hopefully successful

[00:35:29] Frederick: way? Yeah, it could. Um, so. MCU is the kind of bad myth, and I don’t even know if it’s worth getting in too deep with that. I mean, I understood when Martin Scorsese was like, MCU is ruining cinema, and he didn’t mean superheroes are ruining cinema.

He, I think, meant that the big tent, huge amount of marketing and money that gets pumped into these blockbuster films is, has basically not only overshadowed but Bushed in the corners and even out the door, um, really good stories that, um, could be and should be and are being made in film, but let’s move to comics, um, itself.

So the direct to market comics, which was really a big thing in the eighties when we started to see comic book stores opening, um, as you remember, you know, in the early. Um, two thousands. We also saw lots of graphic novels and comics, especially manga and things like borders and Barnes and Noble. Um, so that was after a period in the, in the nineties, actually, when the floppies, the more ephemeral kind of comic was starting to see a big like drop and, you know, both industry and artists were really smart.

They’re like, okay, let’s, let’s create monster big story arcs with these serialized comics, knowing that once the They’ve been serialized. They’re going to be collected and re marketed as a graphic novel, right? So that was really significant. You have a graphic novel on your bookshelf. Now you have them in libraries because libraries can actually like bake last, right?

Whereas comic books, it’s, it’s impossible. So, so that was really important. Now that said, um, and you know, still doing really well, Scholastic. Outruns Marvel in D. C. by a gazillion miles. And Scholastic is a publisher that has cornered the middle school and teen market for graphic novels. Raina Talgemeier is, like, their big champion.

Oh, sure. Okay, just to give you a frame of reference. Honestly, Raina is probably… She’s a very quiet, lovely person, would never do this. She could probably be in the Fortune 500 top earners. Of like 20 the last decade scholastic is making in other words to if that’s any measure of the popularity of visual storytelling Well, it tells you everything it scholastic outsells Most of the big, um, the big East Coast publishers that are doing novels.

I’m thinking of things my

[00:38:25] Dan: kids read. Is that like Dogman and like, and like Captain Underpants? Or there’s all Scholastic?

[00:38:30] Frederick: Yes, yes. Oh, that’s interesting.

[00:38:32] Dan: I didn’t know that. I mean, I’ve known those individual things, but I didn’t realize there was this whole sort of behemoth. Scholastic. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:38:40] Frederick: Publishing house underneath it. So now Pyroclass will be in our comic book stores, um, right here, Austin Books and Comics. It’ll be, you know, available all over the country in comic book stores. But you’re right. I mean, the internet has been a game changer, especially for those. Who, um, are, were the doors to this kind of a comic that is being distributed across the country and comic book stores have access and by that, I mean, things like Kickstarter and the internet and those have definitely opened the field.

We’re seeing more Latina comic book storytellers, uh, LGBTQ, um, intersectional, black, brown, all, all sorts of stories. And yes. The short answer to your question is it is a incredible time to be putting these kinds of stories out in the world. And it’s also incredible because there is a hungry audience for it.

So

[00:39:36] Dan: from a sort of just purely commercial point of view, when you’re imagining a comic book like this, do you have to be thinking not just about Each successive episode issue of the of his story, but that they need to be able to be collected into a graphic novel on the one hand, and then we have to have an eye out to TV and film as well.

Is it just part of the

[00:40:02] Frederick: model? Yeah, so we live in what we call a convergence culture. Absolutely. So not only TV and film, but toys. You name it. It’s endless, right? So, um, action figures. I have a 3d printer in the Latin X pop lab so that, you know, my students and I can, you know, basically send over to the printer and a superhero that we just drew or, you know, created.

Um, definitely. So not only the big arcs. But where is this within convergence culture? I’m going to share another image here with you. So this is the steampunk era chronicles, which you mentioned, and this one is only going to get a. Issue one limited edition release in July and then we’re going to save what could have been all of the serially published issues after we’re going to actually hold them back and just publish the graphic novel.

Um, but there is also I’m developing right now concurrently the cartoon and the video game. So to your point. It is, it is a, there’s no way you can think of comics anymore as isolated storytelling kind of phenomena.

[00:41:30] Dan: It’s interesting, I’m just looking at it, looking at this, and it’s interesting in a way, it’s almost surprising in a way, that comic books took as long as they did to become the source material for TV and movies, because they’re just, they’re like storyboards, right?

It’s like, it did, it’s doing, it’s actually much easier to adapt. In a sense than what was the novels, which for a long time were a more traditional source of material for. But you have to go through the whole process of adapting a novel into storyboards and dialogue and comic books. It’s like, I, not that there’s no adaptation, but it’s all right there.

It’s already been supported. A lot of it. Most, most of the text dialogue already. Yep. Um, and it may have been just, I don’t know if it was the technical challenge of realizing these sort of. Fabulous worlds or not, but it’s, it’s surprising the way that it took as long as it did for them to get it right because as you certainly know, and probably people on this know, Marvel had a long history of screwing up of ridiculous movie adaptations that were total flops and are just jokes at this point, right?

You go to the Draft House in Austin and you go to see a Spider Man movie, you’ll get treated to clips beforehand of all the ridiculous Spider Man adaptations they did before they finally… Figured it out, what, in the 90s or something

[00:42:46] Frederick: like that. Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. I would even say, I would go so far as to say that we didn’t really figure out Spider Man until Sam Raimi came along.

So that would be, like, the early 2000s. But, um, but you’re right. So, part of it too is, um, Okay, yes. When I write this script, And whether it’s Guillermo, or in this case, it’s Miguel, and I share it with the artist, um, and I kind of, we work, you know, I go through it with them. That script… Okay, it’s like page one, panel one, um, long shot exterior, exterior crane, you know, whatever, right?

I mean, it literally like, in fact, if you didn’t even want to look at the comic and you know, what we’re seeing here in front of us, all you do is take my script and you can make your cartoon. Yeah. Or your film. It’s, um, so yeah, the comic book writing, uh, the language and the way I have to, you know, lay out.

I mean, okay. So the way I visualize it is very much film language. Now of course, I’m also thinking, is this going to be a four panel page, a six panel page? Am I going to just make this a splash page? And I also work with the artist because they’re super intuitive and they’re like, Now, um, Aldama or Fede, as I’m called, um, let’s not do a splash page here.

It just doesn’t work. Let’s, let’s, let’s like, you know, build, do more of a slow build to this or whatever. So, um, but you’re right. The language is there and it’s almost readily servable to, you know, anybody who’d want to make something out of this. I guess maybe a final question I have for you

[00:44:39] Dan: is what does it feel like to have your, the, the images you see in your head or the text that you write down realized in comic book art?

[00:44:54] Frederick: I know this is the first time that’s happened, but, you know, what is it? Okay, yeah, no, it’s… Honestly, it must be the same feeling that, um, not all, but let’s say, um, when it’s done well, many authors of alphabetic fiction, if you will, get when they see their movie made, a movie made of their book or whatever.

Now, um, there is a, it’s not like I haven’t seen stuff that leads up to, so. Right. You know, we’re in process constantly. Like even with Pete’s character. Um, I was like, yeah, I’m not like, do we have to, like, does Pete have to be that light skinned? Yeah, he’s Irish Mexican. Okay. But maybe we can like, can you dark, you know, darken his hair a little bit and give him less, you know, kind of a jawline.

I mean, you know, um, or in the case of the steam bunkettas, um, with Miguel, Miguel, um, you know, Sochi is actually Filipina, Latina, um, so we want to make sure that in her person and her color, you know, the color palette we use, it’s a little bit different to, you know, the other character is Afro, Latina, et cetera.

So there’s a lot of kind of work with the artists. That said, I can tell you when I do get the fully like colored page from like, I just yesterday, Miguel sent me a five pages that he’d colored after sketching them. I was on the floor. I was just like, um, you know, and I’m going to, I am going to share one of them with you because the, you know, it’s not just the, it’s not just the design, the characters, all that stuff.

It’s, um, oh my gosh, the colors, um, that he. He’s from the Yucatan and so he understands Caribbean colors better than than I could ever and so here’s an example of That’s cool. Yeah, so Isn’t that just yeah and the detail and the color like the water On the underbelly of the crocodiles and just the movement and the greens and the blue of the water and the turquoise.

It’s just like, yeah, it’s awesome. So I’m literally pulling, pulling, peeling myself off the floor. Like, yeah.

[00:47:26] Dan: Well, that’s great, Frederick. Thank you so much for doing this. Congratulations.

[00:47:29] Frederick: Is it out yet? Is the first issue pyro class pyro class drops November 22nd. And, um, um, yeah, it was nice. Really great to be here, Dan.

Thank you for inviting me. It looks like someone’s typing something right now. Um, but yeah, it was. Let me just my final word is yeah, you don’t know comics or haven’t had the chance or opportunity to Dive into the stories that are being told through comics give them a chance. I think they can be as mind blowing and Complex and sophisticated and entertaining as the best, you know, art house movie or the best, you know, highbrow novel or piece of art hanging in a museum.

Um, so,

[00:48:22] Dan: yeah. Yeah, well, we will, you know, we’ve done this with you before, I think, gotten your sort of recommendations, but we’ll do it again for people who, because it’s also… That’s all true. It’s also overwhelming when you’re not familiar with the universe, with the world of comics, kind of where to start.

Um, you can maybe get your curated list of where people should, should enter. And I think it’s also nicely different from when you and I were growing up. There’s a lot more in the libraries than there used to be. There wasn’t anywhere to go. I mean, you were fortunate to have somebody who let you kind of read them in the store.

But otherwise, you had to shell out what ended up being a lot of money for like, these short little things. To be able to read them. And now it’s a lot, it’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better and more accessible than it was, I think when we, when you and I were growing up. Uh, well, thank you. We’ll, we’ll do one again sometime for another, another product of yours, Frederick, and thanks to those of you who joined us.

[00:49:16] Frederick: Yeah. All right, Dan, have a good one. Take care. Into the Colaverse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts. Sound engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find Into the Coliverse podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time.