C In the eighties Beto Hernandez (Oxnard, California, 1957) began publishing in the comic magazine Love
Son of Mexican immigrants, but educated entirely in English – he does not speak Spanish, although some words do appear in this language in his stories – Hernandez’s stories make up a great fresco of characters that develop over time, from family stories: “I would take things from when I was growing up, from uncles and aunts and cousins ??and also friends from school, I would put them in Palomar and change them to make a story.”
“I love connecting the characters and creating new family members, it is an obsession that I have and that I have to control, because if I don’t I continue creating characters. Luba was my first important character, and she had a few children who have had a few children, and I like it because that’s what family is, it grows, it expands and the characters that interest me will write themselves,” she says.
Hernandez is proud of the empowerment of her female characters: “Many people, upon seeing Luba, would decide that she is bad. And no, she is a good character, which I continued because she has many dimensions. However, there is also indulgence, because I love drawing attractive women, but we thought that if we wanted to tell stories with pretty girls we had to give them personality. It just seemed normal to us, but we discovered that she was not, and for me it is important to have influenced other comics in this sense, that really makes me happy.”
He didn’t think it would have an international success, “I thought it would reach a small group, a few hundred people, but it turned out people were interested in this different type of comic, because in the US most people are used to superheroes, although underground comics were already there from the beginning.” It has not been an easy road in a country “that despises comics if they are not mainstream, where commercial comics want to sell toys and series and movies, and ours is a small market but we accept it, because the readers are wonderful.” ”. “Comic books are also culture, and we are on the margins, we do art and communication,” he says, happy about the new reissue, not only because it means that “young people not only expect novelty but also still like old stories.” , but also because “I really like that they are published in Spanish, because in California many people ask me that.”
Catalan version, here
