[dramatic music] ♪ [dramatic music continues] ♪ [dramatic music continues] ♪ [dramatic music continues] ♪ - Hello and welcome to "Comic Culture."

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

My guest today is writer Henry Barajas.

Henry, welcome back to Comic Culture.

- It is good to be back, Terence.

Thank you so much for having me again on your show.

- Now, when last we spoke, you were working at Top Cow and now you are writing "Gil Thorp", which is a legacy syndicated newspaper strip.

So can you talk about that journey going from sort of an administrative role to being in a creative role?

- I've always been creative, thankfully, and it just took the world a little longer to notice than I was hoping.

But yeah, and my good friend Alex Segura suggested to me, he floated my name to Tribune Content Agency and I pitched them my idea for "Gil Thorp," and it was basically, what if Ted Lasso was in a comic strip?

What I love about Ted Lasso is everybody's gravity towards the character and his positivity.

As a depressing person that I am, what I gravitated the most towards is his personal journey in going through a really hard time, his divorce and living in a new country and having to navigate a whole new sport he's never ever played or coached, but his inherent ability to coach is what is driving the team to success.

And that's the kind of energy I wanted to bring to the comic strip.

- "Gil Thorp" has for years been sort of, I don't want to say stuck in a time capsule, but stuck in a time capsule where you kind of knew that every fall, there was going to be the big rivalry football game.

You knew every spring there was going to be basketball or baseball in the summer and there wasn't a lot of character development going on.

We might see a troubled football player, but it really wasn't going to have the same sort of impact that you seem to be putting into this new approach to Gil.

You've introduced new characters, you brought some characters back.

So how much of the lore of "Gil Thorp" did you have to know in order to kind of bring back a character that might've only appeared once in the early 2000s?

- As a fellow comic book enthusiast like yourself, you know that if you're reading a Spider-Man or if you're reading something, there's always gonna be a new writer or some new take on the character.

This is one of those rare occurrences where I'm the fourth writer in 64 years to come in.

The readership has a rhythm that they appreciate with the character.

So my job from myself was to write a "Gil Thorp" I would read, and that is always the most important, I think, when you're writing anything that isn't your own idea.

Even your own stories that you want to tell, you want to tell something that you'd be happy with at the end of the day.

So I thought that it would probably be best to basically break all the rules and go a different direction and have a good time with it because as you know, newspapers are not as popular as they used to be.

The fact that I even get to be a part of this is mind-blowing and beautiful and something I never thought would be possible.

So I'm always grateful to write "Gil Thorp."

A lot of the lore I'm taking from this 1958 to 1959 to '83 to '84, it's called the Silver Anniversary of this original, it has the beginning of the Jack Berrill run and some theme moments in Gil's life.

So I went back 64 years and wanted to pull that energy and have that kind of sensibility because the strip was known for dealing with teen pregnancy, drug use, racism, and it's safe and that's one of the things about my work is as much as I love "La Voz De M.A.Y.O," I pulled back some punches and I wish I hadn't.

I wish I had done that some more.

And this is my chance to not hold back punches.

We are talking, I had reintroduced a character, Melanie, or Melissa Gordon.

She was pregnant.

Gil talked her out of an abortion, said you can live with us since your parents won't live with you anymore.

Fast forward all these years later, she comes back to Milford with her kid, who is a trans boy and this is something that Gil has to deal with now.

I think there are consequences to standing by your convictions and I think this is an interesting way to talk about it because trans athletes in the schools right now is a very big thing that coaches are dealing with.

And before I started writing the script, I was interviewing a lot of actual coaches who are practicing or retired and I got to get an insight from within their world that a lot of people don't really get to see.

And that's what I'm hoping comes across in the comic strip.

- You're bringing that human element back to Gil.

And I know that you've also been taking some criticism from readers.

It's an interesting point that you make about newspaper readership being down.

There are less comics in newspapers and I know that recently a newspaper chain decided to consolidate all of the comics in all of their papers across the country and a lot of the King Features characters were omitted.

So in a world where there are less venues for newspaper comics, how important is it to make it relevant for a reader who might not read a newspaper, but might go to gocomics.com and get a fix there every day?

- I mean, going in by talking about transgender athletes, non-binary students and gonna tackle some more controversial discussions that are happening in schools more rapidly.

But thankfully, Tribune Content Agency, the people there, the editors, they all have my back and they're very supportive of doing things that are a little more contemporary because, like you said, "Gil Thorp" has been one of those nostalgic reads.

You can go and see what's going on and it's still a certain time period with a certain kind of feel.

And Rod Wigham, who has been drawing the comics since 2007, at least is keeping that consistency with the strip and has been such a great collaborator.

He was very cool with doing the things that I was wanting to do.

I mean, he could have easily said, "No, I'm good.

This is against..." I don't know where his stance into any of this is and I think he's such a professional that even if he did have a problem, which I don't think he did, I talk to him regularly and he was very on board on talking about these issues and having these type of discussions.

Like I said before, I'm trying to tell a story that I would read, something that I would appreciate, and you can't please the GoComics commentaries and the readers.

You can't please the people running these in the papers.

You just have to take the opportunity you have and go as far as you can with it.

And just to sing Rod's praises, I asked him if I can purchase the first strip that I wrote that was featured on July 11th, 2022.

And this is the original art of the first strip that I had printed in the newspaper.

And I feel so grateful that I get to keep that piece of history for myself at least.

Yeah, I mean, it's really depressing that comic strips are being omitted or they're really pushing readers to the website to go digitally because I am very grateful that I grew up with a newspaper coming to my doorstep every day and reading the comic strips, but ended up reading the stories in the news.

But that's such a nostalgic deal for me.

My goal is to reprint the book at the end of the year to find a way to, I don't know, just to, I want to be able to have it and hold it and be able to reach more of an audience because I do have a foothold with Amazon, comic bookstores and bookstores and libraries.

So I know that once it gets recollected, and it hasn't since the Jack Berrill days, I'll be able to find a wider audience and really not have to depend on the papers as much, even though I do.

I mean, primarily my royalties come from the papers that are running the strips.

So shout-out to all the newspapers that are hopeful that still ran "Gil Thorp."

Even after you Google "Gil Thorp," his most controversial story was when he convinced Melanie, or excuse me, Melissa, to not get an abortion and that drove the strip out of a lot of papers.

So my goal is to add Gil to more papers.

It got added to the Arizona Daily Star, where I used to be a reporter and an employee.

Very grateful for my friends and colleagues that are still there that support me.

And yeah, it's such an exciting thing, Terence.

I wish I could just put it in words, but it's like every day, something I wrote is published and every week I write a chapter in this character's life that to me is just so much fun to just, I have a great time just ruining his day at the expanse of a good story.

- I think you and I have similar background in that daily paper coming.

Me growing up in the metro New York area, we had Newsday on Long Island and we'd get occasionally the Daily News, especially on Sunday 'cause they had a great comics section.

And that really for me as a kid sparked my love of comics and the fact that I could get into the adventures of Calvin and Hobbs one day or see what was happening in Bloom County, or heck, even just see what ridiculous sandwich Dagwood was about to eat.

It really just connected with me so that now, as somebody who's much older than I was back then, I still love comics.

And I'm just wondering, before we get into your process, just do you see something similar with modern audiences that is able to connect younger readers to the classic comics, much like the newspapers did?

- Yeah, I think a lot of folks, kids are reading a lot of Webtoon comics.

That's a really big audience that was just at New York Comic Con and I got to be on the Hispanic Heritage Panel sponsored by Webtoon and there was a couple of cartoonists there that had over 100 million views.

And my good buddy Alex Segura, who was also on that panel, has been doing a lot of great work with Marvel Voices and pushing the diversity.

And I think that's a really big key thing that's happening in comics these days is it's now starting to reflect the world around them much more accurately.

And I think that's becoming more and more important because we're long past the days where Luke Cage can say "Sweet Christmas" and people go, "Oh, that's the way Luke Cage talks."

You know?

So I think we're seeing more of an audience that's coming through that wants that type of representation and I think that's really important.

- I would agree.

I mean, I know that if I'm trying to, I guess if I've got an idea that I want to bring to the market, I'm probably gonna try and reach as many people as possible.

So having as diverse a cast and as diverse a creator team as possible is probably going to help me achieve that, especially if I'm trying to tell stories in the contemporary world.

- And you gotta go where the people are.

I mean, like you said, when we were kids, newspapers would come to us.

We would go to the grocery store or gas station or corner store or liquor store and you'd be able to buy comics off the rack.

And I think that accessibility is becoming more and more important now, especially with internet becoming more expensive.

Libraries I think are another good resource that's becoming less of a thing you need to explain to people and more of a practice that's becoming influenced more commonly.

So, yeah, I think the audience is growing.

It's a multi-billion dollar industry now and we're seeing, I think we're moving past that.

I think people are more understanding and more respectful of the medium, so they don't turn their nose up to it as much and just consider it like a superhero thing.

But yeah, I think the comic book industries feel a little more healthy.

I mean, once you know how the sausage is made, it starts to bog you down a little, but it's inherently it's all about just making good comics, telling good stories, and finding as big and small audience as possible.

You know?

I would've been happy making comics on Kickstarter and sending it to 500 of my friends.

Now I have an audience of thousands of people that read "Gil Thorp" and they read my stuff to Amazon and go to comic book stores.

So I feel like I'm very lucky and fortunate to have the kind of audience that I have today and to take advantage of so many different places.

If you open up a comic on Monday through Saturday where "Gil Thorp" is being run, if you open up the comic section, you'll see in some places "Peanuts," "Dilbert," "Garfield," and "Gil Thorp."

And that's just like a total dream come true.

- Another interesting project that you've worked on recently was "Helm Greycastle," which is a great way to look at the fantasy D and D sort of set, but put it in Mesoamerica.

So could you talk a little bit about that project?

- Yeah, so last time I was on your show, I was talking about my first graphic novel, "La Voz De M.A.Y.O Rambo."

And in my research there, the Pascua Yaqui tribe was documented by Spanish priests during the Inquisition.

And I had no idea that my mother's side of the family was dated that far back.

And then I realized, oh, I know nothing about Mesoamerican history.

And I started to kind of touch on it a little.

And I lived an hour from the border.

I'm from Tucson, Arizona, and none of this history was parted to me.

And I think that there was a huge effort to stop kids, especially brown kids, get that kind of information and get that kind of education to empower them.

So here I am in my thirties reading about Montezuma and Cortés and all of these different outlining tribes that were not just all called aspects.

That was just one.

It's like calling the United States, if you're referring to the United States and said all its citizens were Texans.

That'd just be like a weird way to address it, but it's just for the general populace, that's like the easiest way to get your point across.

So while I try to educate folks on Mesoamerican history because it's a big ask, there's a lot of words that aren't easy to pronounce and there's a lot of information in there that I gleaned from the indigenous account from a book called "Broken Spears" and I think an important book that's mandatory for all North Americans to read, and that was the problem I was having.

All the research I was doing, all the documentaries I was watching was told primarily through the lens of European or white educators, which I think is very interesting.

And something that I have been doing is playing, role playing D and D. I was inspired by "Rolled and Told," my friend Skeens and Jen Vaughn, who all were super cool and got me in, was that they helped me break the barrier.

And my really good friend Ariana Totoro has been my DM in all of the DMV games I've been playing and I'm having such a good time and I think comics is a good way to do it.

It's a 4.99 comic.

You can play a game that will last three hours plus, and not only do you get that, but you get a whole story along with it.

And I think making this kind of thing affordable and accessible to people that, like if you see the Dungeons and Dragons player's handbook, it's huge and it's very dense and it's not friendly to people who aren't really into fantasy or even D and D for the first time.

So that's why we try to make this game that's in all four issues user-friendly, even friendlier to beginners, and if you are advanced, you can change the statistics and whatnot.

But "Helm Greycastle" was my pandemic book.

When I last talked to you, 2020 was a year I was gonna tour "La Voz De M.A.Y.O."

I was gonna go across the world and do 24 events in 12 months and that all just shut down.

And I just went into full writer's mode and just with the help of Bryan Valenza, who I just hung out with at New York Comic Con, we're promoting our new book, "Beyond Legends."

It's coming out the first week of November through FairSquare Comics, the three-issue anthology that has over 15 different stories that we plan on fleshing out as independent miniseries.

- It's interesting because the anthology is something that we've seen come back.

For years, it's been tough for a publisher to do an anthology because without a recognizable character on the cover, people might be reluctant to buy it.

But by tapping into this I guess sword and sorcery mythology kind of bent, you kind of attract that audience.

So when you were planning out this new venture, is that something that you were considering?

- Yeah, I think one of the things about being in comics is trying to stay in comics and it's all about how many ideas you got.

It's really about telling a story to different markets and to different readers.

And I'm really lucky that Bryan Valenza trusted me with his vision to flesh out these Indonesian folklores and make them more contemporary, and it's kind of what I'm doing with "Gil Thorp."

So we worked so well together on "Helm Greycastle," with Claire Napier, Rahmat Handoko.

He's tapped some of the best talent in Indonesia for us to tell these amazing stories with.

I mean, the one that that's closer to home is "Peligrosa" for me.

It's about a Mexican superhero fights chupacabra, corrupt law enforcement and border patrol, and she's just doing her best fighting in Tucson, fighting crime there.

And yeah, it's basically the Mexican bad girl we never got, that HBO decided was better as a tax write-off than it was something that could be shared with the world, even though Michael Keaton comes back as Batman.

I don't know, you know?

But that's the thing.

There's always a skepticism to Latinx storytellers to creators and stories that they don't sell.

And when you try to make these types of things, they end up being scrapped.

They end up being considered a loss.

I feel very lucky that we're taking our heritage and the things that we have to say in our own hands and putting them out there and hopefully with enough support or interest, we get to do bigger stories on each of these characters.

It's all through the Mystic Universe and this is something that Bryan is trying to create and I give him so much credit to like create a universe, which is something that just seems daunting.

Something I would never do, but I think it's a lot easier when you have somebody who's just as hungry as you are to tell some interesting stories and do it with your friends and have a great time with it.

- I wanted to talk about the New York City Comic Con, which you just got back from.

We tried to do this connection last time from the floor, but we just couldn't get it to work properly.

So as a professional going to a convention, it's different than a fan going to a convention, or in my case, a pseudo-journalist going to the convention.

So when you're going there, what are your goals and your objectives when you are sitting at your table?

- I mean, number one is to engage with fans, to find new fans, reconnect with natives and contemporaries, people that are doing the same things as I am and we're all having the same types of struggles and it's one of those things that's really important to me to connect with people and in doing panels, in the Hispanic Heritage Panel I was moderating, I brought up the point that a lot of Latinx books or a lot of Latinx creators, including myself, don't do enough to include Afro Latinx characters or creators in their projects when it's such a huge part of our heritage, our history, our lives.

Erasing that is really disrespectful and I think just as bad as the kind of things that we are protesting against.

I mean, this last couple days, LA City Council has been under hot water because one of the representatives was on tape saying derogatory things about Black people and she was Mexican, or she was not white.

I don't know what exactly she identifies as, but it sparked the people in the community, the Black and brown people to protest at City Hall yesterday because that shouldn't be excusable.

So, I mean, maybe that's the kind of experience that I have.

I'm the kind of guy that goes to dinner and talks about politics, religion, and history and probably offends everyone around me.

But it's one of those things where you get to, I don't know, I think it's an easier place to have a conversation because it's rare you're in a facility where the majority of people read.

And that I think is a beautiful thing.

Yeah, I mean, getting to see Marc Silvestri, who's promoting his Batman series, Hannah Rose May, who's a good friend of mine, who's promoting "Rogues Gallery."

We also see Matt Hawkins, my boss there, and seeing Dennis Kitchen, who I've become very fond of, who's just one of the most prolific historic figures in the underground comics and publishing industry, and also just having a good time with friends like Terry Dodson and Robert Wilson IV.

And New York Comic Con's a very social, fun place and it's also a great place to talk to editors and New York Comic Con's a real business show.

And I think the shows are becoming rarer and rarer that way because there's so many and we all can't go to the same shows, but New York is very much a staple of that.

Is this studio that you have, is that always like that?

- No, actually what I do is every week when we have a show, I come in.

We mostly do this on Thursday, so I have a class at 11 till 12:15.

I'll take a break and then around 1:00, I'll come back in here and put all this stuff up on the set.

It takes me-- - Wow.

- 45 minutes or so to do that.

And then-- - So cool.

- We do the show at 3:30 and after we're done taping, I take a couple of minutes and then I put it all back in my office.

Henry, I see that we've just about run out of time.

If the folks watching wanted to find out more about you, "Gil Thorp," and your projects, where can they find you on the web?

- They can find me on Twitter, @henrybarajas, Instagram, @henryjbarajas, and you can read "Gil Thorp" in your local newspaper.

If they don't have it, ask them to add it, or gocomics.com.

Yeah.

I'm always on the internet.

I'm very easy to get a hold of.

And you can also go to your local comic shop, "Helm Greycastle," and most of mine are there, as well as "Beyond Legends."

I've got a new story in "Creepshow #4" that's coming out, or #3 is coming out through Skybound with, I'm doing a story with Danny.

I'm really excited for people to read that and there's so much more stuff I'm working on.

I can't wait to talk about it again on your show.

- I look forward to that.

Henry, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me today.

And thanks to everyone at home for watching "Comic Culture."

We will see you again soon.

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