In the eighties, Beto Hernandez (Oxnard, California, 1957) began to publish in the comic magazine Love – which he did with his brother Jaime – stories about the fictional town of Palomar, in some undetermined place in Central America on the other side. of the United States border, many readers compared it to Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, but although I had heard of it, I had not read it. “In the end I went to the bookstore, bought One Hundred Years of Solitude and read it, and I was surprised by how similar they were in many ways. Maybe it’s because of the heritage of Catholicism, maybe there are the same interests, although obviously his work is more fantastic and much more intense,” recalled the author a few days ago, one of the star guests of Comic Barcelona, ??where he presented the recent reissue of the first volume of the comprehensive Palomar published by La Cúpula.
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 international success, “I thought it would reach a small group, a few hundred people, but it turned out people were interested in this type of
