The Four Color Media Monitor

The New York Times wrote about a comics specialist from Puerto Rico whose worked on an exhibition that tells how the Caribbean island country is seen in the panels:

Manuel Martínez Nazario is a man on a mission: to share stories of Puerto Rico in comic book form. “I want researchers to start wondering ‘What is going on in Puerto Rico? What can I see through the comic books?’” The answer is plenty: “History, sociology, fantasy, whatever you want,” he said.

“¡Wepa! Puerto Ricans in the World of Comics,” which opens Oct. 4 in New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, is built on his decades-long collection and his vast knowledge. Nazario, who was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Puerto Rico, said that in 2021, he was thunderstruck one day when he was staring at his walk-in closet: It was jampacked with 14 bins of comics. “This is too many comic books,” he said, and too few people knew what was available.

His collection of fanzines, political cartoons, comic books and original artwork are all linked by Puerto Rico: The creators and characters are from there or the stories are about the island.

He has also been a frequent source for comics researchers at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where he was a librarian from 1995 until his retirement in 2024. [...]

A Nueva York section spotlights the White Tiger, the first Puerto Rican super hero published by Marvel in 1975. The section also highlights the work of Angelo Torres, an artist and caricaturist whose work was featured in Mad Magazine from 1969-2010.

Stateside, I wouldn't be surprised if mainstream focus on anything pertinent to Puerto Rico was superficial at best, if they even focused on it at all. That said, another character in comicdom who of a Puerto Rican background was Vibe, created for Justice League of America in 1984 by Gerry Conway, at the time of the Detroit location near the end of the 1960-87 volume's run, but who's noticeably not given any citation in this article, which is a shame, because maybe the historian would like to make the argument DC did the wrong thing to originally kill off Vibe just because he had a stereotypical accent and was a break-dancer. That was a classic case of punishing a fictional character for the errors of the writers/artists/editors, and I think it would do a lot of good if realists would address if they recognize that's a poor approach to mending mistakes.

That said, I appreciate the efforts of the librarian to shed some light on the island country's contributions to the art form, and wish him good luck with his exhibition.

Labels: conventions, dc comics, exhibitions, history, libraries, marvel comics, msm propaganda, politics