By Carol Cooper
I went to New York Comicon at the Javits Convention Center this October, and spent most of my time in a special section called Artist’s Alley, where you get to meet and talk to the true creators of the comic books currently making lots of money for everybody but the artists!!!. I began to wonder: why should toy sellers earn more than the artists without whom they would have nothing to sell? Also,why was NY Comicon charging so much money to rent artist booths in Artist’s Alley that many professional artists couldn’t afford to show and sell their work there?
Don’t get me wrong, I also went to the Main Floor where the major book publishers, toymakers, video game companies, back-issue resellers, and entertainment companies held sway. But being annoyed by undisciplined crowds, huge baby strollers, the noise, endless racks of t-shirts, plastic figurines and high priced DVDs of comics-based movies and television shows, drove me to a more civilized space where one could actually learn something about the skilled craft of drawing comic books.
In calm, spacious Artist’s Alley you could meet people who worked on the Marvel and DC books that made the Avengers and Batman movies possible. You could also speak with brilliant independant creators who have launched innovative original titles like Kabuki (David Mack), and YUME and EVER (Alitha E. Martinez)
I stopped by Ms. Martinez’s booth and discovered this black Latina is a fifteen year veteran of the comics industry and one of the few female artists who has worked on superhero books for big name companies like Marvel and DC, Why is this interesting? Because it is still a struggle for women to succeed in normally all-male professions. Such female professionals must be as good as, or better than their male counterparts, or they won’t be hired. So it was exciting to interview Ms. Martinez about her adventures in comics, and her devotion to her own original comic book Yume and Ever. She tells me she used to be shy, and even used only her initials (A.E. Martinez) when she applied for jobs, since many companies would hire male artists before taking a chance on a female. But now she speaks about her craft publically at colleges and conventions, coming out of the shadows like the rising star she was born to be. “Yes, I still get people walking up to my booth asking if I’m minding the space for my husband,” Martinez laughs. “But when they discover I’m actually the artist, we often have an interesting conversation.”
Although Martinez has drawn Daredevil, Ash, the Black Panther and the Fantastic Four, you won’t find her drawings from those franchise books in her artist’s booth. “DC doesn’t need me to sell Supergirl for them,” she says about one of her recent jobs,”but I am the only one promoting my own comic book, so I need to make people aware of YUME and EVER .”
Part what made Martinez want to launch a book of her own was the fact that comic artists’ “per-page” rates for contract work has been getting lower and lower. “That’s why I no longer work for Marvel,” Martinez confides. “When I found out they were paying certain foreign artists more than they were willing to pay the local American talent and still kept trying to get us locals to accept even less, I decided I had to stand my ground and work for people willing to pay a fair wage.” That is also why Martinez created her own superhero title. She knew she had the artistic chops to draw a competitive story, and wanted the freedom to tell that story from her own perspective. The result is her description of a world in which most pre-existing superheroes are destroyed in winning a battle against The Pandora Effect, a destructive terrorist attack on New York City by agents unknown. Despite this great loss of life, the earth is not left unprotected, because the U.S. government announces it has secretly been raising and training a special group of super-powered children who will defend humanity from the next threat to global security.
In book #2 of YUME and EVER, Martinez introduces a smart, gorgeous team of super teenagers of every race and gender. She reveals their diverse backgrounds and personalities while giving us a glimpse of real-world political confusion and hypocrisy. If you like video games or television’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (and if you liked Marvel’s New Mutants, the anime movie Evangelion or the classic graphic novel American Flagg! by Howard Chaykin), you will like YUME and EVER. Ask for it the next time you are in your local comic book store!!
