A new edition of Adafruit’s comic reading list — this week, in recognition of National Hispanic Heritage Month it’s a review of some Hispanic American comics creators by shipping impresario Zay!
Gabrielle’s work employs a personal lexicon of family history, rock and roll memorabilia, Catholic iconography, nostalgia, and dark humor. She grew up surrounded by the Funk Art popular in 1970’s and 1980’s Sacramento, California. In the 1990’s she moved to Oakland, California to study painting and film before leaving art school to join the Puppy Toss comics publishing collective.
Her comics have appeared in various publications, such as Top Shelf, Bust Magazine, Scheherazade, and Truthout. In 1994 she co-edited the anthology On Our Butts, a collection of comics by influential female cartoonists such as Ariel Bordeaux, Megan Kelso, and Jessica Abel. She received a BA in Painting from San Francisco State University, where she began making her large mixed-media drawings.
George Pérez is a Puerto Rican-American illustrator and writer of comic books. Along with John Byrne, he was arguably the most popular and influential artist in American comic books in the 1980s. He primarily illustrates superhero comics, mainly published by DC Comics and Marvel Comics, and is known for his clean, dynamic, yet ornate style, with a strong emphasis on group superhero action scenes.
Pérez’s family moved from Puerto Rico in the 1940s. Like many of the immigrants from Puerto Rico, they were poor and settled in the Bronx, where there was and is a large Puerto Rican community (barrio). Pérez’s parents became factory workers. Eventually, they moved to Flushing, Queens, New York. Pérez often visited a comic book store called “Mike’s Comic Hut” there. He became fascinated with comic books and their illustrations.
Angelo Torres is an American cartoonist and caricaturist whose work has appeared in many comic books, as well as a long-running regular slot in Mad Magazine. Torres was friends with artist Al Williamson in the early 1950s and occasionally assisted him on work for EC Comics with fellow artists Frank Frazetta and Roy Krenkel (known as the Fleagle Gang).
When the E.C. comics line failed after the enforcement of the Comics Code, Torres went to Atlas — later to be known as the Marvel Comics Group — and drew a number of short stories for their mystery titles in 1956-57. Torres later worked for Warren Publishing under editor Archie Goodwin. He contributed art on 20 stories for Creepy, Eerie and Blazing Combat from 1964 through 1967.
From October, 1968 until March, 1980 he drew legendary satires of contemporary U.S. television shows as the penultimate feature in Mad Magazine. He was named #61 in Atomic Comics’ list of The Top 100 Artists of American Comic Books.
The Hernandez brothers, also known as Los Bros Hernandez, are the three American cartoonist brothers Mario, Gilbert, and Jaime Hernandez. The three grew up in Oxnard, California. In the 1980s they gained fame with their legendary comic book Love and Rockets, a prominent series in the early alternative comics scene, and which drew influences from a wide range of influences, including mainstream and underground comics, punk rock, and Mexican-American culture.
They began publishing the black-and-white series themselves in 1981, and Fantagraphics Books published it from 1982. The brothers normally worked independently of each other on their own stories. Gilbert’s most significant work features prominent magic realist elements in Central American settings; Jaime’s has centred on multicultural Southern California. Mario’s contributions have been infrequent. The first volume of Love and Rockets after its fiftieth issue in 1996, and while Gilbert and Jaime have taken on a great variety of other projects, they frequently returned to their most familiar characters.
Check out our previous posts Bee and the Puppycat, Spacetrawler, Grrl Power, Krazy Kat, She-Hulk, King City, The Whiteboard, Hubris, Akira, The Wicked and the Divine, Saga, Are You My Mother?, Cairo, Static, Elfquest, Hip Hop Family Tree, Finder, and Peanuts!
