JARRED LUJÁN Gets Personal with NO MORE BLADES IN YUCATAN
- Luis Godoy II
- 2 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Luis Godoy II returns with Jarred Lujan, who is with us again to chat about No More Blades in Yucatan - available in digital format through Ko-Fi today!
COMIC BOOK YETI: Welcome back to the Yeti Cave, Jarred. For those that do not know Jarred, he worked with Comic Book Yeti a few years ago. He also won the Mad Cave Talent Search in 2019, becoming a member of the 2022 DC Milestone Initiative Class, Ringo Award Nominee for Crash & Troy and as a member of the YULE and Lower Your Sights anthologies. He’s had several successful crowdfunding campaigns with The Twin Blades, The Twin Blades: Blood and Obsidian, All the Devils are Here, and Southbound.
JARRED LUJAN: Dang, that’s a lot of comics. If you’re reading this and your first introduction to me was the Mad Cave Talent Search in 2019, I want you to know that I think you’re the coolest person on the planet.
CBY: We could go on about the respect he also gets from large sections of the indie comics community, but we’ll get this interview started. Jarred, today you come to Comic Book Yeti with a unique comic called No More Blades in Yucatan (a place very dear to my heart as it’s where my family is from and many of them still live.) What can you tell our readers about this new book? Who is the creative team?
JL: NMBIY is a 68-page black and white graphic novella about a warrior named Josefina who has achieved the rank of First Blade. Her life is war and violence as she aids the Viceroy into beating the citizens of Yucatan into submission. Josefina has a dream that makes her feel like she can be more than a weapon. She fakes her death to try and escape the Blades and the Viceroy, and she tries to start over, only to discover that she must confront the world she helped build. It’s a love letter to samurai flicks and westerns, the way they intermingled, as well as me kinda probing the concept of state violence.
The book was drawn and co-created by Mau Mora. Mau is a really phenomenal artist and, considering that the book was going to be black and white, I took a lot of time figuring out who I thought would fit the best with this story in this style and be able to hold their own. Mau is just that dude. Unreal talent. A phenomenal set of skills. The book was lettered by Micah Myers, who is the World Heavyweight Champion of My Heart. Micah is one of the top three letterers in the business. What I really dig about Micah is that he has this unique, kinetic style of lettering that I like. Again, being a black and white comic, I felt like Micah’s style would be a really fantastic fit with Mau’s art, and I was write. He crushed it.Our logo was designed by Pete Carlsson, who did design on Crash and Troy and Southbound. Pete rocks, he takes my really terrible directional ideas and kind of makes these genius, gorgeous logos. Christa Harader, aka Cabbage, edited the book. I love Christa as a human being, but when I want an editor who can really be frank with me, they’re the one I go to. Sometimes I want to be told, “I get what you’re going for, but you’re doing it wrong” so I can build from there.
CBY: (Readers can get this digital 68-page comic at Jarred’s Ko-Fi–linked above–at a pay what you want rate.) It’s not hard to see the parallels to the real world between the Blades and these groups that are making some people disappear. How long has this comic been in the works? And what is it like working with such a hard working and talented artist such as Mau Mora? Shout out to Mau Mora’s amazing designs.
JL: I started working on this in 2023. In ‘23, I asked myself, what story did I need to tell in comics before I put the Comic Creator thing behind me? This is the story that came from that. I went to school for philosophy and my real expertise in that was political theory. I think about it all the time. Unfortunately, it is not exactly a great time to be a theory person. But this is kind of a combination of all the things that I love: theory, samurai movies, westerns, manga-ish, hard emotional moments, and big ass sword fights. There was also a lot of inspiration from a book called Necropolitics by Achilles Mbembe, a Cameroonian philosopher. I had the bones for Yucatan for a long time and it really wasn’t until I read Necropolitics where I had the real meat of it. Mbembe is really poignant in the way he dissects the power of the state to choose the people who live and the people who die–some are given lives more valuable, others are deemed replaceable. I won’t dive into it too much, but anyone who has been watching world events for the last two years is probably very in tuned to the idea that the most powerful people in the world practiced necropolitics right in broad daylight. Mau came in when I had the script finished. I had actually started to talk to Mau about a different project, but I decided this was the one we needed to move on. Mau is almost certainly going to be the next generational talent in comics. He has a style that blends manga and western comics that I really believe can draw in other readers with style then delivering big, heartfelt (and heartwrenching) moments that will keep them around.
CBY: The lead protagonists of No More Blades in Yucatan are women. It would have been easy to have the story be male-dominated; why was having women as the leads a better choice? I think it was a great choice considering the themes of the book.
JL: I mean, look at the history of war spanning across time and ask yourself what the people who start them have in common: they’re men (I’m sure that wouldn’t be the only thing in common, but that’s another topic for another time). But, beyond the obvious, what I think is flying under the radar a little is that the two children in the story are boys. Past the larger themes in the story, is a subtle one of two young men and the women raising them to escape the cycle of violence.
Women in my life are the only reason I have escaped that same masculine cycle of violence. My wife, my mother, my sister, my grandmothers, and now my daughter, opened my eyes into that cycle and the emotions it wrought in me and helped me break.
CBY: How much direction did you provide Mau Mora for the action in the 2nd half of the story? Like I told you after I read it, I would buy a print version in a heartbeat, and if you ever did a print version I’d recommend doing it as a Black, White & Blood special edition.
JL: So, when it comes to comics, I really like giving artists some breathing room. Let Mau go off and do his thing, you know? So, the pages that I thought it was really important for the theme of the story or the narrative, I provided direction. Otherwise, it was like “Yeah, I think this is how it would look best, but do what you want” and he did. Mau has some real stunner moments in those action sequences, some that really stopped me in my tracks more than the big splash pages he did that pause for emotion. Just a ridiculously talented person.
CBY: Now if I am not mistaken, this will be one of your final comics with the exception of stuff already in the works such as a Crash & Troy sequel and the third volume of Mezo that has had some hiccups due to the downfall of Diamond. Is that still the case or can I give our readers some amazing news?
JL: I’m glad you asked this. You know, last year was a bad year. My kid began having medical issues that were really costly and I couldn’t find any comics work to supplement our income. It created a really stressful time. I felt like a failure to my family because I couldn’t just solve the problems for us, we had to go through it together in a hard way. I felt like a failure as a writer because I couldn’t get any work or even an email back, even though I had accomplished, what I feel, is quite a bit in comics. I felt like I had let down everyone in my life; my wife, my kid, the people who supported my work, the people who believed in me. My social anxiety kinda ramped up with all of that and I got paranoid and bitter and just not myself. But those feelings are not anyone else’s problems. I’d like to take accountability and apologize to my friends and community for conducting myself the way I did. All of them deserve better from me. And, listen, comics isn’t a fair industry; it is definitely not a meritocracy. But, at the end of the day, the greatest lessons from my life have usually come in some form of an ass whoopin’ and this wasn’t much different. I have learned my lesson and have grown as a result. With that being said, there are still some hard things I have to accept; I do not like the freelance hustle at all. I think doing comics as a “career” is definitely over, but I still love making them. I really do. So, I’ll probably stop shelling out page rates and decrease my output significantly. I want to focus more on working directly with my friends and people who want to collaborate with me, maybe helping artists’ bring their own visions to life with my writing. I think there is a place for me in comics, just not in the comic book “industry” and that’s how I’m moving now.
CBY: Can you tease anything from Crash & Troy? I’ve seen Kyler working his butt off on Instagram on so many different things, but I don’t think he’s shown anything specific to C&T unless it was some misdirection on his part. That dude is just killing it artistically. His art is so inspiring.
JL: Yeah, I mean, there’s a little bad news mixed in this. Kyler and I put C&T 2.0 on hold. This is related to me and money. Each issue of C&T costs well over a grand to produce and, like I said, I want to step away from spending that kind of money on these. If C&T 2 was a one-shot, we’d knock it out, but right now, it’s a five-issue story and that is going to ultimately be a commitment I don’t personally feel I can make anymore. My day job is hard-ass work, man. It’s just a tough job, but I am paid well, and I have asked my family to sacrifice in spite of that so I could pursue comics as intensely and doggedly as I have over the last nine years. I don’t want them to sacrifice anymore, after the last year we had. Realizing that this industry isn’t going to work for me, I’d like for them to enjoy the fruits of my labor right now. I want to take them on nice vacations and get them nice things and experience things that we maybe hadn’t before. When my wife and I went on a (delayed) honeymoon to Hawaii last year, we realized it was the first trip we had taken together that wasn’t comics-adjacent in years. That’s not fair to her. So, my priorities changed. I’m sorry to have break bad news, but I want to be clear that there isn’t any animosity amongst the group. Those are still my brothers. I still love them all dearly. (Alternatively, if you got like 12k to drop on making comics, hit me up and we can get it jumping.)
CBY: Outside of comics, how’s the family? Any other creative projects?
JL: Family is great. Kid is doing better, there was a real concern she wasn’t going to be able to be independent when all her stuff started last year, but she’s crushing it now. She’s starting to talk about getting a job because she’s probably sick of my wife and me, hahahaha. Wife is good, she grows more kind and beautiful every day, she’s a constant reminder of my blessings. Creative projects! Yeah, I’ve been in the novel trenches. I started one, hated it, started a second, got stumped, and now I’m working on the third and it is going very smoothly! It’s a historical fiction piece that I am hoping will be a dramatization of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. There’s a lot of really amazing (and TRUE!) things that happened there, it’s such an incredible moment of historical and cultural influence, and the people that were around on each side are all so fascinating. I’m optimistic about it.I’m also pretty sure I owe Marcus Jimenez a script or two.
CBY: Thank you, Jarred for agreeing to this interview for No More Blades in Yucatan. Remember, you’re always welcome in the Yeti Cave. If people want to get more of your work, see what is going on with you creatively, where can people find you or your collaborators?
JL: I’m not really on social media in any consistent way anymore. I definitely don’t get on Twitter anymore, but I pop in on Bluesky (@jarredlujan.bsky.social) for a couple days at a time. Sometimes I find a part of a song that I think is hard and I post it to Instagram. I’ve also shut down my website so I can focus solely on my ko-fi, so if you want work from me or just want to send me a shout, that’s the place to do it.
CBY: Thanks again, this was Luis from Comic Book Yeti, signing off with another interview from the Yeti Cave. Be good, do good, and read comics! Find me on the CBY discord or BlueSky @luisgodoyii.bsky.social
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