[music playing] - Hello and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terrence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembrooke.

My guest today is Edgardo Miranda Rodriguez.

Edgardo, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thank you for having me, Professor Dollard.

This is a great opportunity.

I would have rather be there in person had we not been living through this pandemic, but you know what?

I get to get this really cool view of all these amazing action figures and artwork and Castle Grayskull behind you so it still feels like I'm almost there except I can't touch it.

But even if I were there, you really can't touch collectibles.

- Feel free to touch anything you want on the shelves.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about your career in comics because you sort of came in from a different way.

So if you could talk a little bit how you got started making comics?

- Yeah, it was about 14 years ago I curated my first exhibition.

That was [inaudible],, the Art of Joe Quesada.

Joe Quesada for those who don't know, he currently Marvel's chief creative officer or rather vice president at this point.

He's in the newest documentary on Disney+ called Behind the Mask.

Well, up until that point in his career, he was editor in chief of Marvel, and he never had a solo art show.

So I was an avid reader of this magazine at the time called Wizard, and given the fact that Marvel was such a small mom and pop shop before the Disney acquisition, you literally could just call them and just say, hey, I'd like to meet with Joe Quesada.

So at the time I was a freelance writer and reached out to him.

Did a couple of stories so I had a relationship with him.

And I'm working on an art exhibition for my client, Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, of the Caribbean Cultural Center, and she said, listen, we have a grant coming up that's available if you want to curate an additional show once we wrap up this project you're working on.

And then I said, well actually, I just read about this team of superheroes based on your research.

I think it'd be great if I could reach out to Joe Quesada and maybe put together an exhibition.

She actually thought it was a great idea, because she's a Yoruba priestess herself.

So the three of us got together at the Marvel offices, and that actually would become the genesis of my career in my own way in comic books.

After that exhibition, which was a critical hit, I curated another exhibition, Marvelous Color, celebrating Marvel's superheroes of African descent, also coincided with Marvel's 70th anniversary.

And that inevitably would lead to me actually producing and packaging graphic novels for such clients as John Leguizamo-- the Tony Award winning celebrated actor and activist-- and hip hop legendary icon, Darryl DMC McDaniels of Run-D.M.C.

So gathering all of that professional experience as a curator, as a graphic novel producer slash editor slash art director, I kind of decided five years ago-- literally to the date that we're having this conversation-- that I should start getting into the space of telling my own stories that are actually cultivating storyline that speaks to something, well, I felt was underrepresented.

And five years ago this month, I actually was introduced as a writer.

I published my first comic book with Marvel.

I wrote a story teaming up The Thing and Groot.

But the biggest buzz that came out of that story was the introduction of a new character to the Marvel universe.

And that was actually an Afro-Puerto Rican grandmother who spoke about Taino mysticism.

The Tainos are indigenous peoples of the Caribbean.

And she spoke to her grandson who I named after my own biological son-- my son Kian.

And so that inevitably showed me that there was a hunger.

There was an audience for anything specifically talking about the Latinx experience specifically talking about Latino mysticism and characters.

And that left me with this idea of wanting to produce more.

So instead of pitching back to Marvel another idea, I decided let me go completely independent.

And that's where I came up with the idea of La Borinqueña.

And five years ago, we self-published our first graphic novel of our own superhero La Borinqueña.

- You pack a lot into just a few minutes there.

And it's fascinating, because it's very tough to make an impact on an existing franchise or an existing universe, easy for me to say.

But you were able to do it.

You were able to take the character of Groot, who actually I think predates the Marvel universe a little bit, and you were able to add something to that character that has become not only really embraced but widely loved.

And then you decide instead of just playing with house money, you're going to go and start your own IP.

So when you were making that decision, how much of this is just, you know what?

This is a great time to do it, because I'm going to strike while the iron's hot, and how much of it is, I really hope this works out.

- I think a lot of that comes from having an amazing partner, my partner and wife, Kyung.

She really believed in this idea of developing La Borinqueña.

She really felt that this was an opportunity and the right time for us to do this for ourselves via our own studio.

And she has a career-- a celebrated of over 20 years-- as a fine artist, so she knows the value of creating your own work, creating your own stories, creating your own brand from your own talent.

So we literally just invested in ourselves.

And yes, this was a kind of like a long-- not really a long shot.

This was a gamble.

However, we did something that had never been done in the comic book industry.

We actually introduced our IP in a nationally celebrated event.

And that was the Puerto Rican Day parade in 2016.

And we had someone [inaudible] playing as La Borinqueña and a giant float with close to 50 young people wearing t-shirts of La Borinqueña.

And we were selling those shirts to raise money for their scholarships.

And we tagged that launch.

It literally tagged at that launch of this character to a humanitarian crisis literally occurring in Puerto Rico.

And that would be $80 billion debt that was crippling the Puerto Rican economy and leading to a significant crisis that led to close to 500 public schools closing, an increase in the tuition in the public universities, a massive brain drain, where scientists and other engineers and many others were leaving Puerto Rico in the hundreds of thousands.

And obviously, that was just before Hurricane Maria would hit literally the year and a half later.

So we decided to launch this character, and it kind of like launches big.

And I'm doing all of these interviews.

I'm being invited to the mayor of the city of New York's mansion when we're doing this event.

I'm being flown out to Washington D.C. to speak at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and I didn't even have a comic book yet.

All I had was this poster and an image and the first two or three pages of the comic book.

I didn't have the book yet.

And Kyung was literally saying, we're getting a lot, a lot of buzz, and we don't even have a book.

So let's invest.

Let's take a shot, because there's a chance that we might get something good out of it.

Now, she teased me a little bit, and she said, I never really saw you much as a writer, so hopefully you will come up with a really good story.

And so she planned and packed us up.

We went to Puerto Rico for a month.

We lived there with the boys and immersed ourselves.

Even though culturally my heritage is Puerto Rican, I really wanted to tap into the vernacular, the idioms, the culture, the energy on the island particularly of young people, because I was introducing a character though.

Though she was born here in New York City, she was moving to Puerto Rico.

So while there and for that month, stories just came to me.

I recall one time walking through the rainforest and her origin story literally came to me as we were hiking through the rainforest and waterfalls are rushing down our side.

And so we did take a chance.

We self-published this book and immediately it gets mainstream buzz, which is something that's unheard of because we didn't have a marketing firm, a PR agency, or any kind of management that was actually steering or even developing some sort of strategy.

We just kind of put it out there and, we were very grateful that there were very, very adamant writers at the Washington Post or the New York Times or NBC and all these mainstream outlets that wanted to talk about La Borinqueña.

So before we knew it, we developed an IP independently.

But she immediately became mainstream, because mainstream media was talking about it.

And the funny thing was Latin media came after the fact.

So it's not like we went straight to Telemundo or straight to Univision, once we were on CNN and once we were on NBC or on HuffPost, all the other Spanish media outlets like [spanish].. We need to talk to you.

So there I was, and I'm fluently bilingual.

But it was just something that just kind of like rolled out in an incredible way.

And in the five years we've been handling this IP, we've only published three book-- well, four books now.

We published issue number 1, issue number 2-- our crossover anthology that brought in La Borinqueña and the DC Comics universe-- and we just published a special edition comic book this last December to commemorate Puerto Rico's 125th anniversary-- the anniversary of the flag.

So it's been an incredible journey.

And I have talked at universities or sometimes even to at public libraries, and there'll be every now and then someone who'll ask, well, how do I break in to the industry as if I have this solution.

And I was like, well, let me see.

And I tell them everything I kind of like said.

You know what?

They're like well, wait until you're like maybe in your late 30s before you start doing your first art show, and then maybe in your 40s you start publishing your own comics, because there really isn't a cookie-cutter solution.

And even the late Stan Lee didn't it really make it into his own until he was in his 40s.

This wasn't someone like off the gate that was coming up with all these amazing ideas and IPs that people will respect him in.

He literally created this nom de plume Stan Lee, because he was like well, this comic book thing doesn't work out, at least I can go back to writing the great American novel.

With me it was like I didn't even think of that.

I kept my long Puerto Rican name with all the vowels in there and all the syllables, and here we are.

- You seem to have tapped into an audience that maybe a lot of the mainstream publishers haven't quite tapped into.

And you resonate in a way that I'm assuming is really going to excite that audience that wants to buy comics that represent them.

So what sort of feedback have you gotten from readers and fans either letters or social media?

- Most of our feedback comes from social media.

That's the world we live in today, right?

Immediately-- the instant response, commenting on posts, and overwhelmingly the response is thank you.

Even this morning, somebody just tweeted a photo of their mask.

We have La Borinqueña merchandise, so they're wearing their respirator mask with a La Borinqueña image.

And they tweeted "Thank you for creating this character for us."

And it's across the board-- young women, young men, parents, children, college students, other artists.

And interestingly enough, the book is doing incredibly well across the United States.

It's recognized and celebrated in Puerto Rico, but it's really across to US.

And constantly, we're getting pickup stories, which is in the media when I'll see myself being talked about or La Borinqueña being talked about and I was never actually approached for an interview.

I recall the New York Times published an article "10 Latin superheroes that you need to know about if you're going to attend comic-con this year.

And there on the cover image for the story was La Borinqueña, and I was like, oh, my gosh.

And I got this Google alert that the New York Times is writing about me.

And I'm like, the US, I hope it's good.

So it's like that's kind of like where we are to this day and the response has been incredibly well.

And I think also because one of the things we've done with our IP is that we're the only IP that exists that is intrinsically aligned with philanthropic work.

When we started La Borinqueña out the gate when she was on that float, we were selling t-shirts to raise money for scholarships for young Latin students.

And then a year and a half later when we published Ricanstruction-- the crossover anthology with La Borinqueña and the DC Comics universe Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman-- we raised close to $200,000 from the sales of that book.

And that gave us a huge chunk of revenue that we were able to establish our grants program.

My own partner, Kyung, came up with the idea.

Let's not write a check to just one nonprofit in kind of this crisis mode, which most people do when there's a crisis.

Oh, we raised money and we'll give it, but she saw the value of creating a sustainable philanthropic project.

And she said, let's take this money and distribute it over the course of a few years until the money runs out.

And that's what we did.

We vetted not for profits.

We had them fill out a request for proposals.

And annually, we've been awarding grants.

Over the last few years, we've awarded $165,000 in grants.

And we're quite easily the only comic book that actually has done this.

We take the whole concept of super heroism, social justice out of the panels and into real life.

And we celebrate real heroes that are on the ground doing incredibly heroic work.

And we literally use our character as kind of like the gauge.

She she's an Afro Puerto Rican character, so we support organizations in Puerto Rico that celebrate and preserve Afro Puerto Rican heritage.

She is an environmental science student, so we support organizations in Puerto Rico that worked with environmental justice, work to raise awareness around climate change, and invest in sustainable farming.

She is a young woman, so we invest in organizations that provide services to children if they are in media literacy or in arts or even in women's health as well.

So all of these organizations that we end up supporting are a reflection of our character.

And I think that's one reason why the project continues, because at some point, we realized that anything that anyone purchases through our website pretty much continues to support our efforts, because myself and my partner we volunteer our time to do this grants program.

We visit Puerto Rico out of our own pocket.

We distribute these grants.

We follow up with the organizations.

Even during the pandemic, we eliminated the application process and just sought out organizations then just gave them micro grants because of the work that they were doing during the pandemic was unprecedented, and they were still very relevant working with children, working with families, working with communities.

And that's, I think, one of the things that we're really invested in.

And this year is looking to be something like that too.

We're launching a new project with the National Resources Defense Council, which we're super excited about because this is going to be the first time that we're going to be affiliated with an incredible renewable energy project.

I mean, they're literally going to be installing solar panels in Puerto Rico.

And this is kind of like all as a result of what happened after Hurricane Maria.

It isn't just something that's going to be resolved in a few weeks or a few months.

I mean, there are still homes in Puerto Rico that are covered in blue tarps.

There are still hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans living across the United States that were displaced as a result of the hurricane and will never have their homes again because they were completely lost.

So our will work with this comic and this IP is really kind of a long term.

We're really trying to create a way of like reinterpreting what comic books should be about.

Comic books in my youth inspired me to be a storyteller.

Comic books in my youth inspired me to become an activist.

I would March in protest and afterwards we'll go to St. Mark's comics in the village to pick up the latest copies of X-Men or Spider-man.

It was affirming what I believed in.

But I think at some point, there was a massive disconnect.

And these IPs became corporate brands and are more associated with pajamas and the fruit roll ups than they are about actually making real significant social change.

So I think we're kind of going back to the core beginning of where comic books came from and why they were created.

I mean like literally thinking about Captain America number one knocking out Adolf Hitler.

Those are the origins of where comic books came from, right?

So we're taking that.

And I'm a student, and I'm a fan of comics, so I don't look at creating La Borinqueña as just came out of this vacuum.

No, I'm following formulas that have existed.

But instead of tapping into Western civilization or Western forms of mythology like let me come from Roman, Greek, Norse or even like scriptures from the Bible, I'm looking to Taino mysticism, the indigenous people of the Caribbean island, and looking at that mythology, looking at that mysticism to really kind of like forge an original story that works.

And even in the character design, many, many, many people have told me-- including comic book legend himself George Pérez, who many who won't know pretty much rebooted Wonder Woman.

The Wonder Woman that we see on the screen by Gal Gadot was the work that George Pérez did as a writer and artist in the 1980s.

Created the new teen Titan characters of Nightwing, Cyborg, Starfire, Raven, right, co-created with Marv Wolfman and also was an artist behind the Infinity Gauntlet.

This entire Avengers Endgame franchise, right?

George Pérez, who I brought to Puerto Rico for the first time in his career, was enamored by La Borinqueña costume.

He said he loved how it was asymmetrical, but how it was still kind of classic at the same time.

And told me that he would not accept no for an answer and that he was going to draw a cover for me.

And he says I could do whatever I wanted to do with this cover.

I could choose to use it.

I could choose not to use it, but he wanted to draw the cover.

And that became the cover of our second issue.

And he even gave us the original artwork.

And if anyone knows anything about original comic book artwork, original comic book artwork is done in the hundreds if not the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but to have an artist such as George Pérez, who is also Puerto Rican like me, to validate the costume design, and to also validate it by an actual like work of art, and then like within months of drawing that he says, I'm officially retiring from the comic book industry.

To know that our comic book cover was one of the last covers he actually drew is just mind blowing.

And it's just kind of like an incredible affirmation.

And that's the response.

People online saying they love the costume.

People online saying they love our philanthropic work.

Legends like George Pérez validating it, and even actor activist Rosario Dawson dressing up as La Borinqueña for Halloween a couple of years ago.

And as a result of her love for the character, her reaching out to us and collaborating with us.

And we did an incredibly successful campaign with her from the general election through the Georgia runoffs where we produced a series of animated public service announcements of La Borinqueña engaging Latinx voters to register and to turn out to vote.

Rosario Dawson herself was the voice of La Borinqueña.

ROSARIO DAWSON(VOICEOVER): I'm La Borinqueña, and I've teamed up with Voto Latino to ensure that Latinx Georgians line up to vote in this runoff election.

She came to us.

She was like, I love what you guys are doing with La Borinqueña.

I want to do more work with you guys.

So it's like something that's never been seen.

I mean there are a lot of independent IPs out there.

And they're even like major IPs under these major corporations that people still have yet to uncover, and here we are.

- It's really interesting, because you're able to craft stories that are engaging to an audience and yet have a point and a purpose.

And you're able to do it in a way that engages them so that they want to be more involved.

And that's got to be a fine balancing act having the traditional elements of superheroics along with an actual message and call to action.

So as a writer or as an editor, how are you sort of put all of that together to make sure that it's entertaining and at the same time has that impact that you want it to have?

I look at it as I'm in front of my stove preparing a hot pot of sancocho.

And sancocho is this food that's enjoyed in Puerto Rico but also throughout Latin America.

It's the hardy stew with vegetables, with meat, and a very thick broth, but it's kind of like a mix of everything.

And every region cooks it differently.

And you kind of have to measure out the spices to see how you want it to taste and maybe a little more savory, a little more salty.

When I'm writing these stories, I approach it that way.

And I love using the metaphor of sancocho because that's my character's favorite meal.

She literally said in the first issue.

Because I believe that everyone has the particular taste.

Everyone have a particular point of entry into the writing so into the story.

So when I'm writing and when I'm producing these stories, I approach my work with the same level of research that a scholar would.

I'd have not crafted a story that is fantastical in nature or a universe that's completely fantastical in nature.

Even some universities and cities are rooted in reality from Metropolis to Wakanda et cetera, right?

They are fantastical, right?

I'm actually drawing reference from a real place-- an island in the Caribbean where three million Puerto Ricans of US citizenship who are living in a colonial state for the last 123 years in the United States.

That's the real life world.

And there's so much rich history that because it's a colony of the United States, it's completely erased and overlooked.

Puerto Ricans on the island don't even know their own history.

They can debate you about US history, because that's what they're learning in school.

And it isn't until many of them make it to institutions of higher learning that they actually uncover real history that's been hidden from them for years.

So a lot of the work that I do, I'm constantly finding ways.

I don't want to soapbox.

I don't want to have a character that's monologuing.

But I believe in Easter eggs.

In Spanish we refer to them as [spanish] where you kind of like make a little reference.

And hopefully, somebody gets what you're trying to say, so you don't actually have to just speak directly at it.

Like literally the word means indirectly, right?

And I try to put little nuances in there in a panel or in an exchange between two characters.

And I kind of put it out there.

And what I never expected is for it to come back.

And when I hear from high school teachers or the graduate students or graduate students that are studying and teaching my books, and they'll literally pull up a panel.

And I got to sit in a classroom at Penn State where a graduate student was teaching.

And she invited me to sit in the classroom.

And I'm just blown away, because she's comparing the work to Eisner who is pretty much the founder and the art storyteller who came up with the word sequential art.

Sequential art storytelling.

And she's comparing my work saying that I'm pretty much breaking every rule that Eisner set in storytelling.

And then at one point she defaults to me [inaudible],, so do you want to add anything?

And I'm like, I'm good.

I'm enjoying this ride.

I don't need to take the wheel.

And so when I'm writing, there's a lot of there's a lot of history that I put in.

But I don't try to bog down literal history.

I don't want it to become a history lesson.

I look at it as-- as a young person, I listened to Public Enemy growing up in high school.

And Chuck D would occasionally just name-drop.

He wouldn't create an entire song about a historical figure.

He would just name-drop.

He would say Malcolm X.

And I was like, who's Malcolm X?

And this is before Google, so you'd literally have to go to the library and be like, excuse me librarian.

Anything on Malcolm X?

I want to learn about Malcolm X.

But now with Google, you could read the comic book and immediately go, OK, what does that flag mean?

You can literally take your phone and scan an image and Google will search for that image to see what I'm referencing in the actual comic book.

So there's a lot of research.

And when I'm writing, I have two monitors in my office.

So one monitor will be my Word document and the other monitor will be a browser.

As I'm writing, a thought, a historical point, will come to my mind and I'll Google it to confirm it.

OK, OK, great.

And I'll incorporate that.

Or I'm watching videos, and I'm learning new phrases, and I go back to my script.

OK, I got to incorporate even if it's just one word.

I got to incorporate that one word.

And then as I'm storytelling, I'm a very unorthodox writer, because I'm an artist.

I'm a graphic designer.

So I haven't even coined the phrase yet.

I have to figure it out, but I'm lettering and writing at the same time.

So I write a script that's kind of like an outline, and then I'll get my artwork from my artist but as I'm actually putting the pages together and putting the dialogue bubbles, I'm actually rewriting myself.

My second book I completely rewrote.

Even though the artwork already came in, I completely rewrote it.

And my art team was like blown away.

They were like, how did this story happen?

I was like, well, I just felt that the conflict that I originally had with this really didn't have that much merit.

So I decided to create a completely different conflict with the character.

And that conflict I felt that was more viable was for the character herself to have an internal conflict.

Kind of like an identity crisis like, who am i?

Am I the suit or am I wearing the suit?

Which I feel was like a universal concept with superheroes is who is really the it.

Is it Batman or is it Bruce Wayne?

Like which one is the mask, and which one is actually the real person?

So I thought to myself, this is a classic comic book trope.

Let me kind of like work my own way of telling that story.

So yeah, it's a lot of non-traditional storytelling.

And I think because of the digital age that we live in, I can literally have Microsoft Word and Adobe Illustrator on two different screens and constantly work them with each other.

I love and like really adapt that type of graphic design.

I'm able to work that.

And I'll edit myself.

Sometimes I'm like, OK, that's way too much.

I got to take all that off, because this art is so beautiful.

I just want the art to literally speak for itself.

- I see we have just about 1 minute left before we have to wrap up our conversation.

If people watching wanted to find out more about you and your work, where can they find you on the web?

- la-borinquena.com.

That's the easiest place to find us.

Our website is where our store is.

You can get an overview of our philanthropic work as well as watch videos of some of the awardees that we've been supporting over the last few years as well as see a lot of the campaigns we've done.

For example, the newest music video we did commemorating the 125th anniversary of the Puerto Rican flag.

We did our first music video, which is amazing.

Like I literally wrote my first song, and I had celebrities singing to this song.

And you could also see the public service announcements of La Borinqueña voiced by Rosario Dawson.

That's the spot to go.

la-borinquena.com.

- Well Edgardo, thank you so much for taking time out to talk with me today.

It's been a really fast half hour and again, thank you so much for being able to share a few minutes with us.

And I'd like to thank you at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

[theme music] ♪ - (VOICEOVER): Comic Culture is a production of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

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