Voice, Vision & Creation: Metacritical Meditations by a Latina Comix Author

Three scholars and one scholar-creator will present papers that delve into the world of Latino comic book storytelling as both a counter-narrative practice and one that excavates and celebrates important and complex cultural... [ view full abstract ]

Three scholars and one scholar-creator will present papers that delve into the world of Latino comic book storytelling as both a counter-narrative practice and one that excavates and celebrates important and complex cultural values and signifiers. Creator-scholar, Liz Mayorga, will provide a metacritical analysis of her own work within a space dominated by men; she will also speak to how her counter-visual/verbal optic clears a space for the infusion of history (from the pre-Columbian to the contemporary) and myth in the making of her Latina-centered storyworlds.Rocio Prado will follow with an analysis of the importance of comic book creation for young Latino audiences and how formal shaping devices used function to clear a space for a new type of storytelling that resists generic and subjective policing; she will also discuss the importance of the construction of this ideal audience in Lowriders in Space when most comics and books generally for children construct an Anglo ideal audience; these latter narratives that figure Latinidad slip into didacticism and exoticism. Ellen M. Gil-Gómez complicates the Latino comic book terrain by considering how two different creators--Navarro (Sonambulo) and Jaime Hernandez (Locas)--use the figure and theme of the luchador whereby one reifies cultural signifiers and the other complicates and challenges narrative expectations and embrace communal identities. Finally, Frederick Luis Aldama draws on theories of Latino comic book storytelling along with research focused on cultural traditions such as día de los muertos Aldama analyzes how Javier Hernandez (El Muerto), Rhode Montijo (Pablo’s Inferno), Daniel Parada (Zotz: Serpent and Shield), Alex Olivas (Tzolkin), and Cyrstal Gonzalez (In the Dark) create visual-verbal counternarratives that resist cooptation and affirm a complex hemispheric indigeneity.

Panel 78