In operation since 2013, UMC Comics has built a catalogue of half a dozen titles with their own distinct narrative worlds and characters. Comic Book Yeti's Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, sits down with co-founder Jonh Curcio to discuss what they've been contributing to the Argentinian comics scene.
COMIC BOOK YETI: Thanks for joining us today, Jonh! How are things going in La Plata?
JONH CURCIO: Hi, Andrew, everything is fine here, thanks! Thanks to you and the whole CBY team for this space to be able to publicize our work.
CBY: Certainly! I'm looking forward to learning more about your perspective on comics publishing. I’m keen to ask, as we don’t customarily publish in Spanish, how did you learn about Comic Book Yeti and decide to contact us for an interview?
JC: I've been trying to expand the publishing house to the whole world for years, so every day I take the time to research, observe and read things from the world comic market. It sounds like a lot, but it's something I like and even though it takes time, it entertains me and I learn a lot. In this tireless search (haha), I came across a very interesting site for amateur editors like me: Indie comics zone. On that site, besides being able to add your comic to the catalog, they have articles with very interesting and valuable information. Among them, there was a section with pages that make reviews and well, I took a list and started sending emails.
CBY: A bit of cursory due diligence turned up a few English language press spots, like this announcement in Comics Beat and a nice introductory summary of your titles from Gutternaut. The Gutternaut article mentioned crossover popularity in Brazil, which largely speaks Portuguese, so can you tell us about your forays into the comics industry beyond Argentina thus far?
JC: Yes, the crossover is titled “the South American Union.” It’s the first time a crossover has been done between five publishers/authors from five different South American countries. I’ll try to be brief, but it’s so you understand the context. When we started UMC with Luigiman we created a Facebook group, which was just emerging in those years, along with the artist groups we had at the time. One of them, Leo Figueroa (Darkcat's scriptwriter), shared a video about the publishing house MED comics (years later, we published one of their comics in Argentina) that presented a complete universe of Peruvian superheroes. That video enchanted me and surprised me; it was like seeing a door to heaven, because it opened my eyes and made me realize that we were not the only ones who wanted to have our own universe.
Excited by that discovery, I started looking for superheroes from all over the continent, and thus I made a very extensive database. With that information, I reformulated the idea of the third issue of Sol, which was a proposal that had occurred to me as a child about what would happen if when there was a MERCOSUR meeting (full members are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay), each country brought its national superhero? Leo had already finished the script, Marco (the cartoonist) had already drawn about five pages, and I asked them both to please do everything again. I got to work and selected four candidates that I considered potential for the comic. The only criteria that the superheroes had to have was that they had to be heroes who worked for their government or agreed to work with their state. All except Black Lizard had this characteristic, but since I already had my own heroes who represented the Brazilian government, I introduced a subplot of Black Lizard covertly pursuing its president.
From there, after the contact I made with its creator Gabriel Rocha, I began to establish conversations with many local artists and forged good relationships with several. In fact, after the success of the South American Union, I managed to get my Brazilian characters to participate in a crossover there, which was called “Epopeya” and brought together more than 100 superheroes from independent Brazilian comics. Sadly, after some time and several pages, the project did not come to fruition and has remained stagnant until today. But thanks to Gabriel and his mediation with the people at Editorial Kimera, we agreed to exchange material and they published La Union in Brazil and we published a compilation of Lagarto Negro in Argentina. Likewise, we published La Chola Power by Martin Espinoza and we have a few more in mind, but for budget reasons we have them on standby.
Finally, during the pandemic, we took advantage of virtual conventions and were able to enter big events like Comic Con Xperience in Brazil, Santa Cruz in Spain, and Expo Games in Mexico. Also thanks to the internet, we had a presence in Comixology (until it became complicated after its transfer to Amazon). We sell on platforms like IndyPlanet, GlobalComix or Comic Distro and we ship all over the world, as we have already shipped to the USA, Germany, Italy, and Australia.
CBY: It's enlightening to hear about all these collaborations happening across the region. On the note of English language comics, you’ve translated a number of titles (Silver Sun, Darkcat, Warriors of Tomorrow, Chronology Xero), but you’ve got additional titles available in Spanish. You have different creative teams for each title, but you and Luis Sanchez (Luigiman) form the core editorial team. Can you tell us a bit about the process of creating your various books with the teams involved? What additional work has translating and localizing these stories into English entailed beyond their production in Spanish?
Double cover of issue #4 of silver
JC: Exactly, Luigiman and I are the creators of the characters and their stories, except for the Warriors of Tomorrow (Guerreros del Mañana), which are a creation of Guillermo Zanocco (who gave us the rights). Although we both draw and I also write, we do not have the level that the artists who work with us have, so we decided that our best position at UMC would be that of editorial directors. Luigiman and I were in charge of selecting scriptwriters and artists for each title. Prior to 2016, we spent three years studying the market in Argentina and meeting with potential artists until we found some that fit what we were looking for for the project. Once we assembled the teams, in a meeting we gave them the plots and details of each series and chapter to be developed.
The estimated time to finish an issue was a month and a half or two months at most. Even so, it took us a little longer, but the idea was to try to invest and have finished material before our departure, with the goal of publishing monthly. For the translations we hired three translators and, unfortunately, according to the reviews we received, they were not so well done. We recently re-did them all with a recommended translator and fortunately they seem to be better. They are not perfect, but they have improved from what we have been told. You could say that an extra work involved in doing the translations were the local idioms and comments that perhaps only make sense here. Despite this, I think that the adaptations we achieved are quite good.
CBY: Yeah, the intent was definitely communicated without confusion in the versions you sent, but I can see how idioms would be a challenge. You’ve mentioned you're partnered with Comics Distro to get your titles to a wider market. Can you tell us a bit about how you formed your distribution relationship with the company, and what sort of retailers around the world it has enabled you to work with? What does it add to your business that you aren’t able to do with direct market distribution?
JC: Well, with Comic Distro a door was opened that allows us to sell digitally with the opportunity that if someone wants to make a large purchase, they can do so without us having to invest in a large amount at a high cost. I don't know what the distribution costs are like there, I understand that they are around 30 or 33%, but here it is much higher, reaching 60%, which is why we only deal with a single distributor, but at a much higher RRP than we have on our own website.
CBY: ...and understanding those sorts of disparities across the global comics market is part of why I was keen on having this conversation! I haven’t had an opportunity to explore much of the Spanish language comics market - how prevalent are comic retailers? Are there many local comic shops in Argentina, and does the local audience read primarily localized versions of international titles, or is the domestic comic market larger in scale than the globalized intellectual properties? What does the convention circuit look like?
JC: Here in Argentina, the largest number of comic shops are in CABA (Autonomous City of Buenos Aires) or Capital Federal, as we call it in La Plata, haha. In the rest of the provinces, it is much smaller, reaching one or two at most. Online sales and resale sites have made the shops disappear little by little and the bad economy of Argentina in the last 20 years has not helped at all.
The readers are very varied, there is something for everyone, really. Here, both national and European comic readers converge, but American comics reigned until recently, when manga completely dethroned it. Here there are few extreme readers who only read one genre or type of comic. And no, the local market is not as big as the international one. Although there are several publishers, comics or manga are more of a “niche” market.
Now conventions are another thing, luckily there is a lot of variety and in all the provinces, you will always have some event. Smaller or bigger, there is something every month. Of course, they are not exclusively about comics, in general they are stocked with themes related to pop culture. For us, the two biggest and most important are Crack Bang Boom (chaired by Eduardo Risso) and Argentina Comic Con. Of the two, the first is our favorite, because the CBB public is a niche that consumes comics, while the ACC is more varied and the experience is more oriented to the film and series public.
CBY: Sol de Plata - Silver Sun - definitely evokes a similar sense of country which I most recently saw represented by Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez with the character of La Borinqueña, emblematic of Puerto Rico’s civic pride. What does a sense of national identity and civic duty mean when creating media that represents Argentina in the fiction your company is publishing? When you tie a character to national identity, what challenges are created when you are creating commentary in your fictional version of Argentina on what is actually happening in reality?
JC: That's exactly what we always wanted to do, which is what we do: take the reality of Argentines and put superheroes in it... but in a way that makes sense and is coherent, so that it doesn't seem like they can't be flying next to you. That's why we develop plots and everyday situations that have meaning for us. Even so, it's difficult, because we live in a country where we weren't taught that there can be superheroes in Argentina. In fact, until we launched in 2016, there hadn't been any Argentine superheroes in color since the 90s. The image of the superhero, or the American comic genre, was frowned upon here. But hey, the two "big ones" kept selling the same, right? So with Luigiman, we said: maybe the problem isn't the genre, but the proposal that is given to the public. And well, here we are.
CBY: I asked earlier about the comics industry in Argentina - growing up, who were your favorite comic creators (and characters)? What Argentinian writers and illustrators should our readers know about that they would never have encountered if only looking at the English language comics market?
JC: My favorite was always Jim Starlin. My favorite work was Infinity War, but I also have many others like Kirby or Jim Lee. Characters; Batman, Captain America, Thor, and Wolverine. Argentine authors recommended by Luigiman would be; Alberto and Enrique Breccia, Hugo Pratt and Horacia Lalia, among many others.
CBY: That definitely provides some new material for our readers to check out. So I note that in addition to your editorial and publishing work, the comic Chronology Xero bears your name as writer - can you tell our audience a bit about this story, the premise, and what inspired you to create the series?
JC: When we put together the creative teams, for the Xero title we had a scriptwriter who didn't quite convince us with what he had written. We tried with another scriptwriter and he didn't convince us either. At that time we had four teams working and we saw that the other three were moving forward and Xero wasn't. That's why I decided to take the reins and start writing scripts (I hadn't done so for a few years). To get ahead, I wrote the first two issues. Luigiman liked how my scripts turned out and we moved forward with the artist. Xero is a character created by Luigiman in the 90s, which is why he took me to his neighborhood where he was a teenager and told me his story, how the idea was born and the things he experienced that helped him create and tell the story of Xero. After the tour of Villa Ballester, I got down to work and became Alejandro for a few days, haha. Since Xero is a teenage character and I'm not, I had to catch up a bit on what young people were watching back then, how they behaved and so on. With all that information and following our story line, I wrote the two scripts and left the basis for the rest, up to number six.
CBY: As a publisher, what are you looking for in new titles? Can you provide some insight into the submission and selection process involved in how you prioritize the development of new comics?
JC: Unfortunately, due to the situation in the country, we could not finance projects other than our own, so we have not accepted material from other authors. This year, we are starting to analyze the possibility of publishing other authors, mainly because we want to publish some manga, which is very popular here too. Let's hope that 2025 will be the year where we can give opportunities to other projects that are not our own. We want to, yes...
CBY: It will be exciting to see how your roster of creators expands! We always provide our interview guests with an opportunity to share some inspiring work unrelated to their own comics. What sort of other comics, films, music, literature, etc., should our readers know about?
JC: One good thing about Luigiman and I is that we share many tastes in various fields, so we can recommend movies like 300 or 47 Ronin, the Aegis album by Theatre of Tragedy, Youthanasia by Megadeth or God of War by Manowar.
CBY: John, thank you for joining us today! I hope our readers have a chance to check out UMC Comics, and if you have any other social media or other resources to share, please include any links below.
JC: On behalf of all of us at UMC, we are very grateful to you for the space and we invite everyone who wants to give us a chance to visit our website and read the first issues of Silver Sun, Chronology Xero, Darkcat and the Warriors of Tomorrow in digital format at no cost. Here is our website and social networks:
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