The memoir is the single most common form of graphic novel for adults, but Pedro Martin has taken a novel approach to the genre. Instead of telling a grand narrative, his Mexikid Stories takes the form of a series of vignettes about growing up in the seventies as the son of a large migrant family. Mexikid Stories was recently honored by the Eisners in the 9-12 year old category, albeit repackaged in a more traditional memoir format than was originally seen via the Instagram comics that started it all. Martin was gracious enough to agree to be interviewed by the Comics Journal.
WILLIAM SCHWARTZ: First of all, could you explain the different versions of Mexikid Stories? The vignette styled comics that originally appeared on Instagram aren't exactly the same thing as Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir, which is what you received the Eisner for.
PEDRO MARTIN: So, to explain the difference I need to go back to the beginning. When I was a lowly artist at a massive greeting card company many years ago, I found myself with a lot of free time and a lot of free 3X5 cards. Those cards were the currency of ideas back then. If you had an idea or a joke or a piece of writing to share, you wrote or drew it on a 3X5 and tossed it into someone’s chair or in a box of some kind.
When I wasn’t using those 3X5s in their official capacity, I would draw these little stories from my childhood on them. I grew up in a large sharecropping family in California, so I had a lot of material that I wanted to capture. I treated each card was like a panel of a comic. And I liked that you didn’t know what was coming next in the story because you had to flip to the next card. It was fun!
Then, when I was done writing the story, I would put a rubber band around the stack of cards and toss them into an old Batman lunchbox that someone had given me and went on to write next story. I did this for several years. Just to amuse myself, really.
Eventually, I retired from that job and as I was unpacking my stuff, I found that old Batman lunchbox with all those stories in it. I was looking for something to do next in life and I thought that reviving these stores might be kind of fun. And it was!
As a life-long corporate drone, I decided to put some parameters around the project and write and illustrate these stories to fit on Instagram — square panels, limited to 10 panels at a time. Instagram just seemed like the best place to find an audience. For one thing, it was free. For another, it was mostly adults. I wanted these stories to ring true to my Mexican-American upbringing without having to edit myself. And it was all set in the late '70s so there was always a lot of nostalgia involved. It just seemed like the right place and time for it.
So I did a twenty-panel story almost every week for two years. And admittedly, they were stylistically all over the place. But as I got near that two year mark, I felt like I found my rhythm and my audience.
The folks who eventually became fans were wildly diverse. A lot of people from different countries and upbringings had found something relatable in these stories so that made it all seem like the right time to try and make something bigger out of it.
I took all my stories, sorted them by theme and tried to write connecting materials to make them hang together as a collection of memoirs. Unfortunately, no one I approached was at all interested. “Who are these for?” “These aren’t for kids, right?” “They look like they’re for kids but in this one, the one kid drops the f-bomb. What the hell is that all about?”
Eventually, I sent it all to an agent who explained to me that there was no real market for what I was proposing. The real market, he explained was in middle grade graphic novels. They were blowing up at the time and he felt that if I wanted to approach writing a story for that audience, he would help me. He pointed out that in my compilation pitch, in one of those pieces of connecting stories, I had written two sentences that really intrigued him: “We went down to Mexico to get my grandfather and bring him back with us to the US. The story takes a dark turn and I don’t really want to talk about it.”
He said he wanted to hear that story using the same storytelling sense I had shown in my other stories, but make it work for middle grade! So I did!
Because this was a totally new format, I leaned in to my love of comic books to try and make my stories more cinematic and illustrative. It turned out looking very different from the Mexikid Stories on Instagram. Even the main character had to change so that he looked older and more connected to a real world.
Originally you were more of an illustrator than a cartoonist. Why did you decide to start drawing these vignettes of your childhood?
Corporate boredom. But also, I was working in the Shoebox Greetings division of Hallmark (their alternative humor line of greetings) and their style was quick and loose and straight-up funny. I had just graduated from San Jose State as a designer/illustrator. My stuff was very old-school and tight. Writing these little stories helped me loosen up and learn to draw only what needed to be drawn to get the joke across the finish line.
How do you get your ideas? Is every comic based on a personal real life experience?
Pretty much. I like to say, “These stories are 100% true, 90% of the time.”
When I started, I was pulling childhood memories that were right on the surface. As I went on, one of my brothers, Leon (by the way, we were nine kids — seven boys and two girls) started sending me memories he had of us as kids. Then my dad jumped in and started telling me stories of when he was young too. So I had a backlog of material to work with for a long time.
But the other part of it is the Mexican-American experience itself. That has been one of the biggest source of subject matter for my stories as well as the most popular. Just explaining idiosyncrasies of being from a Mexican background and all the weird and beautiful traditions we have is pretty fun material to work with.
One aspect of your comics that really sticks out is just how radically different your experiences as a kid in the seventies differ from how kids today live their lives. You frequently discuss, for example, how your father would drag you and your siblings all out to work with him. Did you ever worry that people in general, and kids in particular, might have trouble relating to your relatively happy-go-lucky presentation?
Yes, one hundred percent, but this is a memoir series. That’s the magic of the memoir, it’s supposed to help you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and experience things you may not have had the chance to experience. And, if the story is compelling, there’s always a universal truth in there that you might see in yourself.
Even if you didn’t spend most of your childhood doing “stoop labor” in the hot sun for twelve hours at a time, you understand that feeling of being downtrodden but hopeful that some day you might leave this drudgery and find something adventurous on the horizon.
Like in Star Wars! Holy crap, I just realized I was Luke Skywalker-ing it this whole time!
Also, there’s a weird comedy that happens when you explore your darkest and most painful stories. Retelling those stories helps take the sting out of them. It also lets you look at those moments with fresh eyes. Then, you can make fun of them all the live-long day. It’s a way to take back those long, hard years and make them fun again.
I think the humor of Mexikid Stories goes a long way to softening the impact of many of the darker elements, which would probably be outright grim in the hands of other writers. I'm thinking of one comic in particular, where Mexican kids are talking about how a girlfriend can be dishonored and become a prostitute by walking on the wrong side of the sidewalk. It sounds obscene when I describe it, but the actual comic is quite wholesome and charming. Have you received much negative feedback or attempted censorship due to this? I've noticed, for example, that the GoComics archive of Mexikid Stories will sometimes skip over comics, even though this can leave obvious gaps in the storylines.
Oh I love that story! “That girl is street-rat adjacent!” Yes, that’s a super problematic tradition/belief. The weird machismo rules that I was raised with just flew by me as a kid. Now, I get to look at them through a different lens and kind of expose them for the silly and sometimes hurtful things that they were.
There hasn't really been any pushback from Mexikid Stories. If anything, readers will bring up other weird traditions that I should address further. As for the missing stories on GoComics … that might have been my call.
As I started to work on the graphic memoir, I knew there were fragments of stories from Mexikid Stories that I wanted to use again, but in a slightly different way. I think I asked them to pull some stories out so that people wouldn’t be confused by the different takes on the same incidents.
The entire collection will soon be available on mexikid.com once I get my act together. Promise!
Do you think your core audience is really kids, or just adults who like reminiscing about what growing up in the old days used to be like? And would your literary agent have a different answer to that question?
I think I have a “brand problem.” My agent would probably love for me to keep creating in the “middle-grade” space. It’s where the biggest audience is. But I’ve only ever seen myself as a storyteller. So If I can continue to tell stories that folks want to read, I’ll happily occupy any space that will have me.
What does your family think of your work? Many of them appear in the comic, and not really in a flattering way, yet always with that very distinct Pedro Martin charm that makes them likeable in spite of what they might be up to at any given minute.
When was pitching Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir, I texted my entire family that I was going to tell this particular story with these particular changes. To a person, they texted me back “Sounds great. Good luck to you!” Which in my family translates as “Yeah, right. Never gonna happen.”
Everyone in my family is a storyteller. My Brother Hugo is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the L.A. Times! We’ve all sat around the table and told a thousand different versions of the same memory. Sometimes we make themselves the hero, sometimes the fool. I think my siblings know that the best stories rely heavily on abandoning your ego in service of the story.
That said, so far no one has really complained. So either I’m really good at what I'm doing with their personas, or they can’t be bothered to read the damn thing. Either way, I’m good.
Perspective is very important in Mexikid Stories, by which I mean, events are always filtered in such a way as to approximate how a child sees these events, not necessarily how an adult remembers them. Mexikid Stories is loaded with weird child logic, only slightly less weird adult logic, and visuals to make this weirdness seem completely mundane and reasonable. How do you get into the right frame of mind to tell stories from this perspective?
Great question. With the book, I was very cognizant that young Pedro had to be as naive as possible so that he couldn’t possibly anticipate what very adult and dark situations that awaited him. My editor, Kate Harrison, really worked with me to try and remember what I was feeling at the time. And my wife Gina always reminded me to take care of young Pedro. To treat him like the innocent he was and not give him my cynical attributes.
Young Pedro’s realizations could never be as pure as they were in the moment, so I needed to process a lot of that to be a mix of me, younger me, and the middle grade reader. I also needed to care for those young readers, too. I had to figure what they would get, what they wouldn’t and what was important to the story.
With all that in mind, my initial take on the story changed. It went from being a comedic road story about thick boogers, sudden diarrhea, and live deer surgery, to a story about cultural identity, family history, and maturity (But also thick boogers, sudden diarrhea, and live deer surgery).
The series, on the other hand, had to rely a lot on narration vs. dialogue (plus illustration). I tried really hard to have the narration in all the stories be the straight man and the actions and dialogue be the kid logic’s response to the set up. The admittedly child-like drawings was another way to try it keep it fun and palatable.
Mexikid Stories has excellent one-liners, although I've noticed they're hardly ever the punchline, just angry, irreverent statements about an offensive thing a child might be doing at any given moment. Do these also come from real life, and do you have a favorite?
Yes. Growing up in a family of eleven, you had to either be a good fighter or really effing charming. I was neither!
All I remember was that it was hard to throw a solid punch if you were laughing. So being a smart ass was a prerequisite for us younger kids. I can’t say that all my smart-assery is word-for-word what I said back in the day, but the tone is correct.
How has the transition to comic writing from illustration been for you? In general in this field, artists are more likely to do it the other way around. Were you always just a cartoonist at heart?
I was always an illustrator first, but working with humor card writers rubbed off on me greatly. When I first started working at Hallmark, writers and artists were kept separate. Both were specialized skills and would really never cross-pollinate. I was lucky enough to be mildly funny enough to make a few of them laugh, so they invited me to be around them and soak up their vibe.
After about ten years, I went into management and I got to work with all kinds of creatives. Writers, illustrators, designers, and animators. When I went back into the creative side a few years later, I decided I wanted to learn to animate. So, I taught myself Flash and learned all I could from the folks around me about recording, editing, and writing. Six months later I introduced Hallmark to an online animated series called Asteroid Andy. A story about a future boy who is suddenly exposed to all kinds of alien races when the largest elementary school in the galaxy lands in the field right near his house.
I loved working on Asteroid Andy. It was a one-person animation project for the first few shorts. I relied heavily on real kids doing real voices. I found that they were way funnier than I was, so I would often let them off the chain and waited to see what I would get. Often, I would come out of the recording studio with crazy brilliant dialogue that I would take back to my office and try to cobble into some kind of story. I created an alien character named Rex (voiced by me) who I would use to link the kids’ crazy ramblings into some sort of story.
When I left Hallmark, the bug to write comedy was still there. So I started going down this incredibly satisfying path. Writing and drawing my own stories.
Are there any comics, or any other art, that you would describe as being very influential on your own work? What about personal favorites that don't resemble Mexikid Stories in any way shape or form?
I used to work at an alternative newspaper in college (The San Jose Metro) as a designer. I mostly designed ads, but I also took in the comics and sized them for print. Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek was the thing that broke my brain. I loved her storytelling, her writer’s voice, and her drawing style so much that I stole all the copies of her work that came into the office and put them in a folder. That folder became like a little comic-writing bible to me.
I also stole all the Matt Groening Life in Hell strips too. The simplicity of his storytelling was electric. I wished I had the balls to do something as simple yet brilliant as Akbar and Jeff.
On the other side of the coin, I was a huge fan of Alex Raymond, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and John Busceama. And I grew up hiding Frank Frazetta books from my mom. She was notorious around our house for trashing things that were even the least bit “sexy.” I lost so many anatomy drawing books to her very strict Catholic sensibilities.
Those are all the questions I have. Are there any other questions I didn't think to ask that you'd like to answer anyway?
This was great! I had to really think there for a minute. Not only is introspection hard to do, it makes you think about all the people who made you who you are today. So to those people I want to say “thank you and I’m sorry.”
The post An interview with <i>Mexikid</i> author Pedro Martin: ‘The best stories rely heavily on abandoning your ego’ appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment