An Odyssey By Interview: Tim Fielder, Oscar Garza, and Rolando Esquivel

 

By Jasmine Mitchell 

In a whirlwind week-long residence at the Latinx Pop Lab Creative Collaboratory, Tim Fielder (Infinitum) along with Oscar Garza and Rolando Esquivel (Mashbone & Grifty) teamed up to create from scratch the epic comic, The Final 4.

UT professor and director of the Latinx Pop Lab, Frederick Luis Aldama—also known as Professor Latinx—threw down the gauntlet: 5 days to start and finish a fully plotted and arced comic book story that involves food. The team far surpassed all expectation. With Esquivel on writing, Garza doing the flats, and Fielder doing the shading, this team was set up for success from the beginning. The Final 4 is a beautifully rendered, deeply heartfelt and joyous epic story of 4 wrestlers and a final battle royal match. The Final 4 powerfully reminds that there is much more to the wrestling experience than getting swept up in its spectacle. It can remind us of our own humanity. 

Originally from Brownsville, Texas, Oscar Garza and Rolando Esquivel are the owner-creatives of The Five Meats Comics. They’ve been partners in the comics book industry since college. Equipped with a passion for Latinx storytelling, Rolando and Oscar create some of the most fun and dynamic comics out there. Rolando’s witty writing works effortlessly with Oscar’s bold renderings. As practicing wrestlers, they bring their insider knowledge and love of the sport to all their comics, including the spectacular The Final 4Mashbone & Grifty was recently picked up by Chispa, an imprint of Scout Comics. 

Tim Fielder is an Afrofuturist illustrator, conceptual artist, and comic book storyteller from Tupelo, Mississippi. He’s been in the comics industry for over three decades and has worked on a variety of projects from fully illustrated works to concept art for video games. Following the worldwide success of Infinitum, in February Tim will re-release a new edition of his comic, Matty’s Rocket. 

After the extraordinary league of comics creatives presented their final project to Professor Latinx’s Intro to Comics Studies class, I had the great fortune of being able to sit with Tim, Oscar, and Rolando.

 
 

Jasmine Mitchell: What's your relationship been with comic books? When did you start reading and why?

Oscar Garza: Well, I started loving comics because I was in love with the Ninja Turtles as a kid. I know they started as a gritty, independent comic, but once they hit it big with the kid’s cartoon, they turned into kid's comics based on the cartoon; those were readily accessible next to the Archies at every store in the world. Then I moved on to the typical comics like X-Men, Spider-Man, and Batman. But what hit me hard was when I was in middle school, I saw a comic cover with a man whose arm was going down the throat of a shark. It just blew my mind; visually, it was insane. And what I didn't know is that the book is not about that at all! The book is more about agency and personal space and toxic relationships. I'm talking about The Maxx from Sam Kieth. I fell in love with the art, it was so amazing the stuff that Sam Kieth could do. I was a really shy kid who just sat in the corner and never talked and just drew. 

 
 

Getting into comics is just something new to see, something new to draw. It helped me come out of my shell once people started looking at the stuff that I was drawing. Then all of a sudden, I became a more fleshed-out person in the eyes of the other students, and that really helped me.

Rolando Esquivel: I got into comics when I was in fourth grade. It was Chris Claremont and Jim Lee's work on X-Men that was the biggest thing for me. I used comics to expand my vocabulary, and because I loved the art. The first thing that drew me in was one of the covers; Magneto's sticking his hand out and he's got this Kirby Crackle energy around it. 

 
 

Then once I started reading, I wanted to know what the heck these words were, so I started grabbing the dictionary and looking them up. Before then it was just grabbing comics off the rack here and there, some Superman, some Batman. I remember I had a RoboCop 2 based comic; I loved the movie, so I was like, “oh let me pick up the comic.” Then, I moved to a place where there was a comic book shop right around the corner. Once I walked in there my mind was blown; there were wall-to-wall comics and toys.

I started picking up different titles and collecting Wizard Magazine. Once I started collecting Wizard, that opened my eyes to independent comics. Before that, I had no idea they existed. I was just learning about them through Wizard. And then from there, it just kept growing. I fell out of it for a little bit, I got more into wrestling. But then because of Oscar, I got back into it thanks to him. We talk about wrestling. We talk about comics and cartoons. That helped me to stay in it because I was like, “Cool, I have something that I can share with my buddy.” But that's where it all started; like a lot of kids, with X-Men. Thanks to Jim Lee and Chris Claremont, especially Claremont's writing 

Tim Fielder: Black Panther came out in 1966, Star Trek premiered in 1966, and I was born in 1966, so there's a lot of synergy there. I started reading comics at a very young age. I'm the youngest of four siblings, and as the youngest, you don't have any control over your entertainment. My siblings were like “Shut up. Read this comic!” I started drawing around age 3 or 4, and because my second oldest brother was an aspiring comic book publisher, we started doing comics. Things for me changed when Star Wars came out in 1977. Then, about a year later, Heavy Metal magazine. Those two things were seminal moments for me in terms of the way I looked at what comics could do visually, what they could do narratively. It's changed my life now. By the time I was 12 or 13, Afrofuturism became the way I did my comics. 

JM: Did you always aspire to have a career in comics, or was there a time when you considered other paths?

OG: Originally the endgame was never comics, but I fell in love with them, and this is what we're doing now, and what we want to do forever. When I went to school, I wanted to be an animator. I wanted to be a cartoon creator because something happened in the 90s where creator-ran cartoons got way more recognition. It wasn't just like “Who made He-Man? Who knows? Who cares?” They put the creator’s name big in the title. Like, “This is the guy who made it!” The name was right there. That really hit me as a kid. There are people in charge of this! These cartoons don't just come from nowhere. Adults make these and get paid for it! That's what I wanted to do.

So, I went to school for animation, and it was in a really weird time where 2D animation was on its way out. 3D animation was on its way in. I always wanted to do animation. I loved it. I still love it. I had a long career in video games because of it, but my heart was never 100 percent there. It was like with Zelda; it was like maybe two bars of the heart, not all the way. It came to a point where we wanted to make a short film about Mashbone and Grifty. We did it in college, and after that, we wanted to do another one. Well, it's easier said than done! The second one never happened. 

We also had a couple of ideas for comics, one of them was The Brownies. And we did maybe three or four pages of The Brownies; it was just a couple of excerpts. The idea of comics was always there because we love comics. In college, I lived next door to a comic shop called Bedrock City. We'd go there all the time. We would always hang out and come up with stories. We worked together, we would drive in a truck, so every day we had these long drives, and we would just come up with more stories.

It was fun just making each other laugh with silly stories, but we wondered, can we do something with this? So we start talking about the animated series again. We came up with an idea, a 12-episode animated series. But we realized it was never going to get done. But, if this was a comic book, it would happen! The idea was, let's make the comic and our ideas are there. Essentially, we just wanted to tell stories, and the comic book was just the perfect way to get it out. 


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RE: It was the endgame when I was in the fourth grade. X-Men just blew me away, and I wanted to make my own superheroes. Problem was, I couldn't find anybody to help me draw it! So, fourth grade and fifth grade is when I was trying hard to get somebody to help me. But then for a little while, I wanted to be a running back for the Dallas Cowboys. I wanted to be Emmitt Smith! Then in the sixth grade is when I really wanted to become a wrestler. But that love of comics just stayed.

Then, like Oscar said, in college, we started messing with creating our comics. But at the same we started the comic, I was also trying to become a screenwriter. I was getting a bunch of books on storytelling on screen. Shout out to Half Price Books for that because I was pretty broke, and that was the only reason I was able to get all these books. 

Since I was riding the bus, my routine going to and from work was to wait anywhere from 10 minutes to half an hour or so for the bus. So, I would put in my earbuds, take out my books, take notes, and write stupid ideas for different things. Teaching myself and learning that stuff ended up helping with comics because I was also buying comics at the same time. But at that point, I wasn't putting those two things together. We were still trying to do that cartoon and the animated series.

I didn't put it together until it was about 2013 when we had that conversation of, “Hey, let's make this into a comic!” I have no clue what my life would be like without comics because it was a retreat. It was part of me, of my education. I used it to help me expand my vocabulary; I became very wordy, very annoying to my older brother because I was always correcting him on stuff. Comics are such a great way to learn. Creating comics was definitely at the top of the list of goals when I was a kid.

TF: I guess I was maybe 8 or 9, I remember because I went to a Catholic school in Mississippi. I was right outside the convent with the nuns, and I told the sister I said, “I know what I'm going to be!” And they said, “What?” I said, “I'm either going to be a comic book artist or a toymaker maker.” The toy thing didn't work out, but the comics thing did! I became a professional at 20. I went to New York City to study at the School of Visual Arts for about one semester. But while I was in school, I got my first professional work working for the Village Voice as a freelance editorial cartoonist working in the Afropunk movement.

That's how I started, and eventually, I made my way into the mainstream system. I was working for Marvel as a graphic novelist. But then, as you stated, Oscar, the world changed for comics in the 90s. It was a speculative market, and the market imploded. I did a graphic novel based on Dr. Dre, fully patented. It was never published. It's in my portfolio at home. Dr. Dre, Man with a Cold, Cold Heart for Marvel Music. I did another one for Onyx, this rap group. But then the company declared bankruptcy. I had to make a decision whether or not to stay here. We didn't know if the American comic book form was still going to survive. 

I went into animation, I studied 3D. I chose animation, and I suck as an animator. Pretty good layout artist, very good concept designer. But you know, I had kids, I had to pay the bills. So I went into teaching while working in the video game industry, doing video concept design. I did that till about 1999. Teaching became a really important component as my technical skills developed. That's when I became a heavy, heavy 3D user. I began to try to do movies, but that stuff is damn near impossible, particularly with the technology that existed at the time.

I was out of the comic book industry for between 12 to 15 years, and I just got back into it in 2014. I have never been so busy, gallivanting from one part of the country to the next doing workshops, doing books. Things seem to have exploded now.

JM: You guys mentioned you wanted to work on a HUD system for the comic. Were there any other ideas you wanted to implement but because of time, you weren't able to?

OG: That was the main one. I would have spent a lot more time on the text within the intro pages, the ones where we’re introducing the characters. I would have made their names more like logos. For time’s sake, I relegated their diet, regimen, and pre-match rituals to symbols. Originally, Fuego Kid is at the bar, hanging out with people and dancing. But because of the time constraints, I just drew a martini to represent that. I would have fleshed that out more to make it like a movie montage rather than Wes Anderson-like symbols. I would have added more action, like a crazy movie montage of things happening. Especially with the battle.

 
 

TF: I would say that's what I love about this story; it’s very “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud. You don't have to show a cut scene, you imply what’s going on. That's why people were laughing when they saw it. It's all self-explanatory. It's made me re-evaluate how I'm telling my stories. Maybe I'm going too far. I have a lot of scenes with fifteen thousand characters, which is great. But do you have to do that every time? 

RE: No, not really. My goal was brevity. Just get to get to the point. But it goes hand in hand with what Oscar and Tim were saying. I like what we ended up with because again, it got to the point.

JM: What do you hope readers will take away from this comic? What's the message you want to send?

RE: Filipe was the most unassuming character in there. You had the big mass, Pastelito, that even the audience is saying is just squashing everybody. Ultimo was just this big Adonis; he looks like a champion. Then you have Fuego Kid who's this highflyer; he looks like a superhero, like Spider-Man. And then you have Filipe, who doesn't have an imposing stature, who does look a little older. But, we got to see what their insides look like; you know what they're taking in. And we saw that Filipe was the one that had the most balance going into this match. It's a simple tale of “don't judge a book by its cover.” Also, as someone that deals with gastrointestinal issues, what you put in your body is very, very important. In this case, it's a wrestling match, but just in living life, it's super important to make sure you do find that balance between diet and exercise.

OG: I’m saying this from the perspective of a wrestler. I like the magic of wrestling, but I mean, everybody's in on it. It's a performance. But in this story, we don't cover any of that. I love stories where wrestling is real because that means that there's magic. The point of wrestling is to suspend your disbelief. It gives me that Santa Clause feeling that I think is missing in a lot of things. I mean, I love the show Heels on Starz, I think it's amazing. But I also love stories where wrestling is real, like it's a world where anything can happen. I like the magic of pretending wrestling is real sometimes.

TF: I knew what I was going to get out of it personally was the fact that I was going to help my friend Professor Latinx. The design brief called for us to do a story about food, and when I saw that these guys were actual wrestlers, I really wanted to incorporate that into the story, and they were totally on board! You could see they love it. If you're going to work on something, you want to work on something somebody's going to love. I appreciate wrestling too because I grew up in Memphis. I grew up in a wrestling culture, but it was just on Saturday mornings because we only had three channels at the time. But also, I've been trying to take opportunities to refine my technique. I knew I was going to do the environments because that's important to my stories moving forward. The type of stories I want to do, I want to be able to expedite them and still retain the quality. I love the fact that we hit all these external and internal points for everybody involved. 

The last job I worked on was one where I was constantly refining my technique. In September, I had one of the most difficult jobs I've ever done in my life because the person whose work I was adapting is one of the most eccentric creators who's ever roamed the planet Earth and working with him was almost dehumanizing. But I kept going because I was refining my technique. This time was the exact opposite. These guys are a joy to work with, and I could use the same technique and apply it with someone who’s going to like it.

JM: And it feels so validating.

TF: You know what I mean? Totally validating. I got what I needed. I mean, this is a test case for me. I saw that this is not just doable in my style, it's doable in somebody else's style. That's the sweet spot, when you know that it's applicable to multiple different styles. And we still hit that design brief that Professor Latinx was looking for. We did all that. 


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JM: Tim, how would you say your work was speculative fiction and Afrofuturism tie into this piece specifically?

TF: Oh wow. That was something that I didn't know if it applied at all until now. The story, it's not just wrestling, it’s wrestling from a Latino perspective that is totally alien to what I know. I've been around Latino communities in terms of African-based religion, but not in wrestling. Oscar and Rolando joked about the crap when I don't even know there's a joke. I'm like “This is a wrestling joke, right?” And they’re like “Yes, you should always assume it’s a wrestling joke.” Like I didn't know who Eddie Guerrero was until two hours ago! But we should all try to have that much cultural connection. 

It's like after I saw Get Out. The feeling I had after I saw Get Out affected me. Not because the movie was good, because it was great. But it began to call into question, how much effort am I putting into my work? Because this guy did a story that was cranking on all cylinders, the performances were brilliant. It looked great. It ascended the medium because it's talking about something that's very personal terms to social culture, racial culture. When I saw Get Out, it made me say, “Look, you're not giving 100 percent in your work.” And if you're here to make a change and \ make a statement, you have to give 100 percent. That’s why with my book, every page is damn near painted. Working with these guys showed me that I don't have to know about a culture to see that someone else is all in on their culture. This will absolutely affect my work moving forward. It ain't Afrofuturism, but it's going to help my Afrofuturism, for sure.

JM: Is there a piece of media that you look to as the gold standard of how creators should tell stories from their culture?

TF: Of course, Get Out, but when you're looking at something that resonates, you know it. And it can be subjective. For example, The Mandalorian is ridiculous. It's ridiculous! But by that season finale in season two, when Luke Skywalker shows up, I'm in tears! At the time I was 54 years old, and what they had done was connected into a time and place that's important, my childhood. Shows like that clarify what is required to do good work, not just the amount of effort, but the amount of thought that goes into it, and that's what I've been trying to achieve. It's about quality of quantity.

RE: I go back to my favorite movie, The Big Lebowski. It's just perfect to me, I love comedy so much. It's smart, it's witty, it's vulgar. Jeff Bridges’ characterization of the dude and John Goodman as Walter, just fantastic. What I also love is you can watch that movie once, and it's super hilarious and it's great. You watch it again and then you pick up on something else. You watch it again and you pick up on something else. So that's the idea that I have in my mind for how I want to write or continue to write. What I want is for people to feel about our work the same way that I feel about The Big Lebowski.

And whenever we do conventions, people come up to the table and they talk to us about our work. You know, if they're fans, they're talking about it with big smiles on their faces, you know they love it. So, I know that we're doing something right. I don't want to dare and say that we're anywhere close to the Coen Brothers, but I know that we're on the right track. There was a Texas Latino Comic-Con last month and there was a panel where we were talking about Chispa Comics, which is a new imprint that we're grateful to be involved with. As soon as they mentioned Five Meats comics, the moderator and the two guests had big old smiles on their faces! Again, that's indicative of our work and how it's striking people; that's super special to me. Tim, he keeps saying such great things about us, even that, it's indicative of where we're going with this thing. 

OG: One of the gold standards to me where someone nails their culture would be Kevin Smith’s Clerks. With other movies, it’s easy to fall into the Hollywood machine where the vision can become compromised. But Clerks itself was so unapologetically Jersey, and I appreciate the hell out of that! I always go back to that movie. I'll download it on my phone and I'll listen to it as I make a long drive down to Brownsville because it eats up some time. It's wordy, it's all about the dialogue. This was a college kid who just wanted to make these rambling monologues. And it's different from our stuff, it's different from our culture. But they painted a picture of what it was like to be in that city so vividly. Not by showing any landmarks, not by showing anything other than that store and the people who came in, their tone, their actions, their attitudes, and their thoughts on life. I felt that was a very good example of capturing the essence of your culture and showing it off to the world in a way that is funny and inviting.

JM: When you come up with an idea for a story or project, how can you tell when it's something worth investing time and effort into?

OG: When we come up with ideas, I measure how much we laugh about it because we're comedians. So if we're coming up with a story and I have this idea, if I see a “LOL” from him on the chat, then we can keep going. And if a day or two passes, and we talk about it again, and it doesn't hit right, we tend to move on. It has to give you the feels. If I feel like I can't wait to draw it, then I know that's going to be a story. In each of our issues, somewhere in the book, there is something that just hit crazy that I had to draw. Usually, that's the first thing that we came up with. We’d say “Wouldn't it be silly if this happened? All right, let's build around that” whether it's the beginning, middle or end. And each comic book has something just so batshit crazy that it was worth pursuing. It has to be something that, as a viewer, I’d be dying to see it. 

RE: The same answer, if it makes both of us laugh and we start riffing on it, then it's worth it. When we had a good idea we needed to write down, we used to say “Put it in Evernote.” If it's Evernote worthy, it's usually something that we can pursue. It's a string of those ideas that bring a story together. One thing that I put in the introduction of our collected edition of Mashbone & Grifty was that it's just a collection of stupid jokes that we thought were funny. And that's what it is, if it makes us both laugh out loud, that's when we know it's something that we need to pursue.

 
 

TF: I'm a huge proponent of sentimentality in my work. But, you have to be careful because you can overuse it. When you begin to deal with Black culture and speculative fiction, but specifically science fiction, there's so much there that’s an absolute. An asteroid of content that has never been done, and it will take us decades just to begin to whittle our way down into it. I've been doing it all my life, but I've had difficulty doing it because the climate never existed to easily produce it and certainly not for folks to read it. Matty's Rocket, which will be out next month in February, is a love letter to my daughter. A love letter to the Black woman who helped raise me specifically, but also Black women in Black culture who are oftentimes the moral and cultural centers of their families. And they did it while also being incredibly elegant. I'm talking about the 20th century, that particular period of Black women. 

I love Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, but my parents never saw it growing up because Black people didn't appear in science fiction. So I'm approaching my comics work right now, which is predominantly Afrofuturism in nature as an anthropologist, meaning that I'm having to fill in the missing DNA. I know I'll never get to all the stories, but I got about 15 of them. I'm going to go on trying to do as many as I can over the next 10 to 15 years.

 
 

JM: Tim and Oscar, you guys both have experience in the video game industry. What are some skills that you learned there that you can easily apply to creating comics?

OG: Time crunch, getting things done on schedule, and then not being afraid to know when to scrap something and just start from scratch. In the video game industry, I quickly gained a reputation for having no ego, which is hard for an artist to do. They would give me a character, and they would give me the 20 animations that they needed that character to do. I would complete them and then sometime later, they would call me into the office and say, “Hey, Oscar, I'm very sorry. We decided this is no longer a robot. Now it’s a giant lizard, and so we're going to need you to redo everything.” I would say, “OK.” And they said, “Are you sure?” And I would say, “What do you mean? Your job is you changed it and you're telling me to fix it.” The game is not Oscar Garza's game; my name is not on it, it's not mine. I'm getting paid still, it's my job to do it. That mentality still helped me here, because this is not hyped as an Oscar Garza production of this Lucha comic. This is the crazy experiment that we're doing. We need to journey forward towards it and see what it looks like at the end. I learned in the video games industry that you will put your life into it, but at the end of the day, it's nothing personal. You have to let things happen and let other people contribute and get their stuff in, and you’ll get your stuff in. And in the end, we have something cool.

TF: My experience in the video game industry was much more truncated. I was only a studio worker for two years straight, and everything else I did was here or there. I hate video games. I have a great deal of respect for video game art. However, the process of creating games is amongst the most complex of all creative processes. You're employing so many different mediums. So when I worked for Ubisoft those 2 years, it changed the way I work. I haven't worked analog since the 90s. It's been all digital, and I'm the type of person that hates learning new software. I hate it, but because of where I am in my career, I'm pushing the Unreal Engine thing. It’s totally changed the way I work, and I'm never going back. Because if you can model a character in 3D, that means your view that model from any angle, and you can use it as a template to do your job.

For Matty's Rocket, her head exists inside a Mudbox. I have difficulty retaining those images in my head, so I need that reference. It makes a difference because digital technology gives you the ability to automate and iterate quickly while retaining the quality. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, but I am saying that it allows me to work as an individual. For me, it's about ego. I'm sorry. So I'm just the opposite. I like to create my own worlds. And now we're in existence where, as a content creator, the ones who have the most play are the ones who can self-generate their own universes, their own IP. And that's why a person like me, I think I'm prospering in this type of environment because I got 50 gazillion ideas, but I can bring a visual to those ideas. And that's everything. This technique, its a game changer for me; it allows me to be able to iterate and generate content, not necessarily quickly, but more robustly within the same time frame. 


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JM: Last question, why the name The Five Meats Comics. Is there a story behind that?

TF: I'm curious about this too!

OG: In high school, I went on a date with a girl and we went to Whataburger. The guy who was on the grill was a friend of ours. He saw us, came out from the back, and said, “Oh man, how come you didn't tell me that you were going to be here? I would’ve hooked you up!” And he's like, “Hey, you see that guy over there in the corner. I put five meats in his hamburger, and I only charged him for one!” I looked at the guy and he had this big monstrosity of a burger, meat and cheese everywhere, it looked awful. He looked at us and went like this [gives a thumbs up with a big smile and a wink]. He was so happy, so happy. I relayed the story to the guys, and we just started jokingly calling each other The Five Meats. Fast forward a long time; when it came time to come up with a name for the label, there was no other name that would have worked. Because that guy was so happy; he was so freaking happy with his five meat burger. That became the new mission statement. What I want out of Five Meats is I want to make you as happy as you would be if you had a Whataburger, with five meats in it, and you only paid for one meat patty. That would be a $15 burger, and you paid, what, $3? I want people to be as happy as that guy when they read our books.

RE: It's also paying tribute to where we come from. People talk about “If you say high school is one of the greatest times of your life, you're weird.” No, that's one of the happiest times I had because of the stuff that happened outside of high school. Chilling with The Five Meats was so cool. I see Five Meats comics, and it helps me remember my friends. That community, because that's also what our books are about. It's about that sense of community and friendship. That’s why I was super on board with the idea. We thought about other names, but it had to be Five Meats comics. That's why it was special to me; we love where we come from and who we grew up with. 

JM: That's a really sweet story, and now I feel like Whataburger! All right, thank you guys so much for sitting down and talking with me!