At San Francisco's Latino Comics Expo, Artists Create Their Own Heroes
Manages to pull in more than its spare 24 pages should be able to hold — religion, history, colorism, multiple directions of racism, gender dynamics, even the impact of global warming on drug cartel activity. It’s a deeply personal work made more intimate by its handmade medium; photocopied shadows of irregularly scissored edges circle her paragraphs and sketches. Somewhere between this morning and this late-morning, Mayorga stapled on the colored-cardstock covers and had a stack of finished products to sell.Here at the second-annual Latino Comics Expo in downtown San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, Mayorga’s zines are outnumbered by more traditional comics, and they’re a world apart from the museum’s current gallery of Latino newspaper comic strips from the last several decades. But her DIY-punk aesthetic philosophy is right at home. There’s a variety of stuff for sale in the three exhibition rooms: lush full-color comic books with proper ISBNs, lovingly overphotocopied mini-zines, mildly obscene t-shirts, DVDs of animated music videos in which adorable Día de los Muertos skeletons meet grisly deaths, screenprinted posters of E.T. in a sombrero. And nearly all of it is self-funded or small-printer published. In the void left by Marvel and DC’s ongoing financial bet against readers of color , the hot new publisher is Kickstarter and your fifty best friends.

