MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 2017, Latino comic book artist George Pérez was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, which summed up his 40+ year career by stating, “George Pérez started drawing comics at Marvel in 1974. After working on such titles as Fantastic Four, The Inhumans, and The Avengers, he developed a reputation as the artist who liked to draw group books. In addition to his Marvel stints, he is best known for his work on DC’s New Teen Titans, Wonder Woman, and Crisis on Infinite Earths.” However, to reduce Pérez to just being an artist fond of group books is to denigrate his significance as a comics creator. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, one would be hard pressed to find a comics artist more synonymous with superhero comics, particularly in terms of celebrating and thus embodying the genre’s imaginative possibilities, which this paper will explore. In both Your Brain on Latino Comics and LatinX Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, Frederick Aldama posits the notion of the “will to style,” which he defines in part as “a willful use of skills and technical devices to give shape to the making of new pop cultural phenomena by and about Latinos” (LatinX Superheroes, 4) Pérez, it will be argued, demonstrates precisely such a “will to style,” specifically by how his art—via its level of detail in character(s) and setting—accomplishes what can be termed a “maximization” of fantasy on the page. If then, as Ramzi Fawaz argues in The New Mutants, fantasy functions as “a political resource” by which comics engages in a transformative politics (4), the artwork of George Pérez willfully exploited this resource for expanding readers’ notions of the “possible” inherent within comics.