We chat with Julio Anta and Jacoby Salcedo about their Blue Beetle saga and managing reality in science fiction.
Welcome to Creator Corner, our recurring interview series in which we chat with the coolest and most thought-provoking creators in the industry. In this entry, we're conversing with Julio Anta and Jacoby Salcedo about This Land Is Our Land: A Blue Beetle Story. Listen to the unedited audio HERE.
What role does the audience play in creation? Depending on the creator, you'll get a different answer. For Julio Anta and Jacoby Salcedo, the team behind the Eisner-nominated Frontera and the recently released This Land is Our Land: A Blue Beetle Story, the reader is waiting, but they wear Anta and Salcedo's faces. They're their first audiences, and as long as they're happy, they're hopeful the rest will be too.
This Land is Our Land: A Blue Beetle Story is the latest entry in DC Comics' young adult line. Julio Anta and Jacoby Salcedo were more concerned with delivering a superhero story grounded in a recognizable reality than catering to a younger audience. For them, the moment you start considering the reader's age is when you lose their respect. Their mission was the truth, and finding that while also parallelling terrestrial immigration and extraterrestrial invasion was the challenge.
We spoke with Julio Anta and Jacoby Salcedo about their collaborative process, why they grounded this Blue Beetle in El Passo, and their responsibility to their readers. We explore a few visual flourishes, the astonishing color work by Francesco Segala, and the joys of snipping Blue Beetle's tendrils.
This conversation was edited for clarity and length.
This Land is Our Land: Blue Beetle in El Passo, TX
Brad: I wanted to start this conversation with the rooting of the story in El Paso. Why was it essential to put it here in this place and obviously at this time?
Julio Anta: Yeah, well, one of my favorite things about DC Comics is that there are so many different cities, fictional cities, that each character lives in. But what I loved about Jaime's character is that he's rooted in the real world. As someone who likes to tell really grounded stories, I've always loved that Jaime's comics are rooted in this very real place where real things happen and that he can experience them as they happen around him. So, especially with the content of the story that we wanted to tell, it was important for me to make sure it was grounded in El Paso, even though I love the comics that our friend Joshua Trujillo does that are based in Palmera City and the film. For us, I thought it just added that other level of reality and groundedness to it to make it in El Paso.
Brad: And Jacoby, for you, what does that mean exactly? How does that change your job to root it in El Paso?
Jacoby Salcedo: If anything, I feel like it makes it easier for me because, as Julio said, we wanted to keep it grounded. I had my Google Street View open in El Paso, so a lot of the buildings and backgrounds you see in the story are based on real places. I mean, we got the El Paso star. We got a little Chico's Tacos reference., We got San Jacinto Plaza. There's a lot of callbacks for people that are from El Paso. If they're reading it, they will be like, "Hey, I know what that is. That's my house." But I wanted to match the groundedness of that story and make sure I pay respect to El Paso as well.
Brad: And that groundedness continues in the suit of the character that will eventually be known as Blue Beetle. I've read some interviews with you, with some colleagues, Jacoby, talking about how you wanted to streamline the design and keep that kind of grounded look to match the narrative. The little tendrils aren't necessarily as prominent as they are in other iterations. Can you talk about finding your Blue Beetle costume?
Jacoby Salcedo: Yeah, yeah. Like you said, the tendrils, I had to cut those. Those are so annoying to draw. Julio and I did a short story with Blue Beetle as well, and I remember drawing that, and I was just like, "I hate this. I can only do so much with the camera." But yeah, no, Julio's only request was for an alien tech looking suit, keeping it grounded. And I was just like, "Okay, sure. Let me just work with that, I guess." I wanted to give it a more skin-tight suit with just some light body armor and kind of make it Tron-esque with some glowing, I don't know, detail. I think we got to a good place with meeting the alien tech and being grounded.
This Land is Our Land: A Grounded Blue Beetle
Brad: Yeah, definitely. I love the evolution of the suit. I love how long it takes for us to actually see the recognizable Blue Beetle-ness of it all - oh, I almost spoiled something. I'm not going to do that. Stop that, Brad.
Julio Anta: Close one.
Brad: Close call, close call. I do think there's a larger conversation that's happening right now - and I think it's probably because of the release of The Penguin series on Max - about comic adaptations being grounded and wanting some sort of a shorter connection to the audience to the reality of the character if that makes sense.
In this story's case, it is also a young adult story, and I think it's interesting to really embrace the grounded nature of extreme ideas when you're telling stories to this particular audience. Am I off on that at all?
Julio Anta: No, no, no. You're totally right. This isn't Oz Cobb, but for me, what's important in all the books that we do is to tell the truth. I don't think you can tell a story that is grounded and in El Paso without tackling some of the issues that we tackle within this book, which is immigration and radicalization and making immigrants the scapegoats.
So for us, everything from the content of the story to, as you said, I don't think it's a spoiler, but we can just say that the suit doesn't come into play until the third act, but throughout the story, you see Jaime using his powers in very segmented, specific ways, like maybe a blaster on his arm or the wings to fly. Then, at the end - when I was writing this book as Jacoby was drawing it, that was still an open question, whether or not we would get to the suit. We experimented with different iterations in different ways. Ultimately it felt right, when he finally embraces these powers fully, to get into that full suit.
Brad: Like any great young adult story, you have a large cast of characters. Jaime has a ton of friends, or really two critical friends and a third former friend who has strayed a little bit. Riley has come back into town, returned to El Paso, and since we last saw him, or since Jaime last saw him, he's been infected by white supremacy and the online virus of white supremacy. At the same time, you treat this character with a tremendous amount of empathy.
Julio Anta: Yeah. So Riley is a brand new character that we created, and I think to make a book for young adults that does tackle that sort of radicalization virus of white supremacy and internet algorithms that push kids down these black holes, I think you have to use empathy. I think it's different when we're dealing with adults, but there are a lot of 15, 16-year-old kids like Riley that are maybe having very honest questions, and they go to the internet to find the answer and then are taken advantage of, and then the algorithm automatically puts them down this path. And you can't just lose these kids for the rest of their lives because of this.
I think redemption is a big part of it. I think to understand the Riley character truly, it's also to understand the relationship that Jaime has with the scarab, which to me has always been a parallel of a different form of radicalization, but obviously, in the traditional Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle stories, he fights back against this scarab that initially tries to control him and make him more violent and go to his base emotions to help be the catalyst for this alien race. That was really the entry point to the story - making that connection that what Jaime deals with is a form of radicalization, and I could use that to run that parallel story of a friend who's dealing with a more grounded real-life form of radicalization that a lot of teenagers have to deal with.
This Land Is Our Land: Blue Beetle Sees Red
Brad: And Jacoby, I'd like for you to speak a little bit about visualizing the way that we see the internet on the page. It's something that is so difficult to do in a comic. In a movie, it's like, "Oh, let's watch characters look at the internet." But in the case of Riley, and how we see his story through his online interactions - I thought your depiction was very scary, very truthful. I imagine that that required a lot of thought on your end.
Jacoby Salcedo: Definitely. I'll also give a massive shout-out to our colors, Francesco Segala. When I saw the script, there's this kind of montage of Riley falling into this right-wing radicalization hole. It was scary. I mean, just seeing how one thing leads to another and how that domino effects him into basically joining the alt-right.
When I sent those pages in, Julio was like, "Man, this is awesome. You did great." And then when I saw Francesco's colors, I was like, "Holy crap, this is amazing." And yeah, it feels like you're in this hellish scene because that is kind of what is happening. It's a scary moment, and it is scary to see from an outsider's perspective because you're just like, "Oh my God, this person is going down a whole dark path that you don't know if they're going to be able to be redeemed." And we really want to emphasize how scary those things are. Also, red is a big color in that scene, and I think it has that evil nature in which that's where a lot of this stuff comes from - it's hate and fear, and that's the premise of that whole scene.
Brad: And the way that you have him so small on the bottom of the page and the internet is drilling down into his head. I was really bowled over by that page.
Jacoby Salcedo: Thank you. Thank you.
Julio Anta: Yeah, I think he killed it on that one. And just to mention our previous book, Frontera, where we also have a surreal dream sequence, that was the direction that I gave. Just lean into the surrealness and almost dreamlike state. Between the work that Jacoby and Francesco did together, it just blew me away.
This Land is Our Land: Blue Beetle's Responsibility
Brad: Do you feel an extra responsibility when you're creating a story that's intended for a young adult market?
Julio Anta: Yeah, I mean, I definitely feel a responsibility, but I think it's also important to show enough respect for these kids. YA is technically 13 to 17. These are really smart kids. I don't try to talk down, and I don't try to write any differently than when I write for adults because most kids read up anyway. Obviously, there are plenty of 13-year-olds reading The Walking Dead or Saga and books that are not written for them. I write for myself in a sense, and people who want to read these stories. It's not necessarily down to a particular age group or audience. But I think in terms of responsibility, I think research is a big part of it.
I'm not from El Paso. I have family that has lived in Texas, but I also have a lot of friends that are from El Paso. So a big part of this, the ideation and the research process for this book was talking to those friends and showing them, "Hey, this is my outline. This is what I want to do with the story. What do you think?" I took their advice and feedback seriously and used that to open up new lanes of the story that I hadn't initially thought of. So yeah, I think coming from a perspective that is already, I think, pretty close to what would be the reality in El Paso, but then being open to that feedback from people that are actually from there.
Brad: And Jacoby, do you think about your audience a lot when you're creating?
Jacoby Salcedo: Not too much, I guess obviously working in YA there is a line that visually I think you can cross, and the script never got to that point. There never was like, "Hey, let's tone it down just a little bit." I mean, for any comic book readers, there are definitely Easter eggs for you to look out for because I'm working on a DC book, so I might as well throw in some little Easter eggs for the people that want to see the references to DC, I guess
Brad: I need that Darkseid T-shirt.
Jacoby Salcedo: Yeah, a bunch of those shirts, I was like, "Damn, I kind of want that too."
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