Take a look at Latino comic artists featured in Austin's MexAmeriCon

One of Oscar Garza’s earliest memories is from his first grade year in Brownsville, when his teacher told the class she wouldn’t accept assignments unless they were clean and neat. Later, she took Garza aside: He was the exception. He could keep sketching.

From a young age, Garza knew he wanted to be an animator. By high school, he was creating a multitude of characters, including early variations of the protagonists who now inhabit his comics.

The Austin-based illustrator and co-creator of the comic "Mashbone and Grifty" — the tale of a down-on-their-luck duo who rebrand themselves as detectives in an “imaginary” borderlands — is one of more than 60 artists and vendors who will display and sell their work at MexAmeriCon.

The free, Latino-focused comic and pop art convention will take place on Saturday afternoon at the Oswaldo A. B. Cantu Pan American Recreation Center in East Austin. The event features artists who, like Garza, are reshaping the molds of heroes in a medium that has greatly influenced popular understanding of the term.

“We’re starved for representation. And the default in entertainment, no matter how people try to argue against it, the default is white,” Garza said of Latinos in the U.S.

“It’s important for everyone to see themselves in society. It’s important to see yourself in art,” he later added.

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A new type of Latino comic hero

Garza’s work has tried to do away with the “defaults” he sees around him. Mashbone and Grifty, the titular protagonists of the comic, reflect that. Neither is supernaturally strong or talented. Grifty is a human who’s “skinny fat” and bad at Spanish like him, Garza said. Mashbone, a mutant monkey, has a bone going through his skull and coming out his ears — a nod, he said, to the shared feeling of outsiderness he and his co-creator, Rolando Esquivel, have felt at different points in their lives.

The strip is a comedy meant for mature audiences that takes place in the fictional New Brownsville. That town may not exist, but Garza and Esquivel have injected their series with the experiences of their childhoods in a very real Brownsville. The questions of borderlands — (failed) bilingualisms, neglected communities, separated towns, intercultural generation gaps and a need for everyday valor — appear in their work.

The protagonists, Garza said, are not meant to be cultural ideals, but “heroes just in the sense that they want to be” heroes, an act he sees as political.

How has Latino representation in comics changed?

Kevin Garcia, an Austin Independent School District administrator and writer, can recall the dozens of comics he read as a youth in the early 1990s. The earliest U.S. Latino characters in his comics tended to be caricatures — X-men’s Skin grew up a cholo in East Los Angeles; the supposedly Puerto Rican White Tiger used awkward Spanish comments or Latino stereotypes in his responses to Spider-Man.

“A lot of these characters you could tell that the person writing it didn’t really know anyone who was Latino,” he said. “Since, times have changed."

Today's characters are of more diverse origins, he said, "because we’ve had more creators making the comics, more of a diverse cast behind the scenes, and more of a diverse set behind the pen.”

During the pandemic, Garcia worked on "Teotl," a comic that tells the story of the founding of Tenochtitlan, the former capital of the Mexica people — commonly referred to as Aztecs — over which Mexico City was built. His motivation for the project was to tell an Indigenous history entirely separate from European-Indigenous interactions.

The illustrator of "Teotl," Emmanuel Valtierra, will display his art at the convention. The San Antonio resident often works in a style strongly influenced by Mexica visual art. His "Codex Valtierra" emulates the form of historical manuscripts but tells an alternate history where Tenochtitlan does not fall to the Spanish.

Artists, audience feel 'seen' at MexAmeriCon

Co-founders Javier Salas and Nino Miranda, two Austin natives, launched MexAmeriCon because they wanted to highlight the work Latinos were doing in the medium.

Salas self-funded the convention’s first year in 2018. The convention has since grown from about 10 to 60 booths. It now hosts musicians, podcasters and pop artists alongside comic artists.

Salas said that the convention’s commitment to accessibility has kept it going. It offers free booths to creators, unlike larger conventions, and has remained free to the public.

Garza said he and other artists appreciate attending MexiAmeriCon each year because it's a convention where the audience arrives to see art like theirs.

“We feel seen as much as they feel seen,” he said.

MexAmeriCon 2023 will take place on Saturday, Nov. 4, from 1 to 9 p.m. at A.B. Cantu Pan Am Rec Center/Park, 2100 E. Third St. in Austin.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin Latino comics convention arrives for Day of Dead weekend