Today we’d like to introduce you to Hector Rodriguez.
One of the most fascinating people in Dallas (The Dallas Observer) creator of the internationally renowned award-winning Latino comic book series El Peso Hero and co-founder of Texas Latino Comic-Con. El Peso Hero has garnered attention and praise from the Latino community. It has been featured on countless press and other media sites worldwide. Growing up in Eagle Pass in the ’80s and ’90s, Hector Rodriguez loved superheroes. Along with his parents, he often drove across the international bridge to Piedras Negras, where his godmother owned a video rental store. He’d head home wearing a backpack laden with Betamax and VHS tapes, many of them black-and-white films featuring Mexican superheroes like El Santo and Blue Demon. Stacks of comic books multiplied on his bedroom floor: Kalimán and Batman, Superman and Chanoc, Lucha Libre and Godzilla. Rodriguez devoured Mexican and American comics alike, but could never find a story set in the borderlands. “Those characters never really spoke to me,” Rodriguez says, “to my background, my heritage or my language.” Hector Rodriguez is now a fifth-grade math teacher in North Dallas, and he’s given his students the borderland superhero he never had. In 2012, he began writing and illustrating El Peso Hero, an indie comic book series starring a Mexican superhero. El Peso Hero fights injustice in the form of government corruption, drug cartels and human trafficking on the U.S.-Mexico border. The series has steadily become more and more popular.
Please tell us about your art.
When Hector Rodriguez was in third grade, the family moved from Eagle Pass to College Station so his father could attend graduate school. “That was a culture shock,” he remembers. “I went from a majority Hispanic class to being the only one.” He frequented comic book stores and worked on his own drawings at home, while also starting figure drawing classes. Meanwhile, his grandfather told him riveting stories about the Zetas and other cartels in Mexico. One day he connected the two. “It was just like a lightning bolt,” he says. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a contemporary Mexican norteño superhero … fighting corruption but also fighting organized crime?
He remembers the day a student came to school distraught because his father and uncle had just been deported. “It’s hard because their role models got deported,” he says. “I felt energized to do these stories that are reflective of our community, through a Mexican superhero dealing with these challenges and giving them hope.”
Hector Rodriguez began posting El Peso Hero stories online in 2012. The series soon attracted a following within the devoted online comic community. Next, he started printing the first issues and selling them at comic conventions across Texas and California. He almost always sold out. “People were just hungry for diversity,” he says.
Rodriguez writes the script for his stories and initially illustrated them as well. Now he sometimes gets help illustrating the issues from artists he has met through online forums, like Chema Cuéllar, from Mexico, and Guillermo Villarreal, from Argentina.
When renowned Marvel Comics artist Sam de la Rosa illustrated a cover, the series became widely popular. The cover featured El Peso Hero, clothes ragged from fighting, in front of the Mexico City statue El Ángel de la Independencia, one of Mexico’s best-known national landmarks.
El Peso Hero is a humble and kindhearted but ruthless vigilante whose superpowers include super strength and bulletproof skin. He protects innocent victims from unjust situations related to real-life situations along the border. One scene in Border Stories, the comic’s third issue, depicts a group of Central Americans riding atop La Bestia, the train that migrants use to cross Mexico on their way to the United States. After cartel thugs stop the train, they hold children at gunpoint to steal the little money they have, until El Peso suddenly appears and beats the criminals up.
Increasingly, the series has included social and political commentary. A recent issue depicts El Peso Hero punching President Donald Trump — an homage to the famous 1941 Captain America cover that showed the World War II superhero doing the same to Adolf Hitler.
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing artists today?
For sequential artists and writers, a big challenge is finding streams of distribution. It is very challenging to share and distribute your work to the greater market. Currently, there is one mainstream of distribution to comic book stores, and that is through Diamond Distribution. Diamond has a strenuous submission process, and it requires a lot of capital to advertise on their monthly purchasing catalog. It is not very indie friendly.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
Fans can purchase physical copies at http://www.riobravocomics.com and digital copies through https://www.comixology.com/El-Peso-Hero/comics-series/49079.
They can follow us through:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElPesoHero
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/El-Peso-Hero/167467206658863
Contact Info:
- Address: Rio Bravo Comics, LLC.
4475 Trinity Mills Rd.
P.O Box #701691
Dallas TX, 75370-1691 - Website: www.riobravocomics.com
- Email: riobravocomics@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/el_peso_hero
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elpesohero/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElPesoHero
- Other: https://www.comixology.com/El-Peso-Hero/comics-series/49079?ref=c2VhcmNoL2luZGV4L2Rlc2t0b3Avc2xpZGVyTGlzdC9zZXJpZXNTbGlkZXI
Image Credit:
Comic book store photographer : Amanda Friedman
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