Mickey Martinez on Co-Creating 'Quetzalcoatl'
By Analisia Gutierrez
Quetzalcoatl’s protagonist, Herminia Ximenez, is your average teenager wanting to live a normal existence with her friends and chosen family. Upon the death of her grandmother, Herminia inherits an Ancient Mayan god. Quetzalcoatl is a mix of a feather bird and rattlesnake and is one of the most important figures in ancient Mesoamerican history.
Hermina’s warrior ancestor trapped Quetzalcoatl into a ring that has been passed down to the women of each generation. While dealing with the loss of her grandmother, Herminia must now take up the traditional to control the ancient deity before it overcomes her.
In much of the fashion of Ms. Marvel and Miles Morales, Herminia is a modern-day Latinx coming of age superhero story. Except Quetzalcoatl focuses on the indigenous identity and traditions of the Central American peoples.
I was able to chat with co-creator Mickey Martinez on personal influences and inspirations for Herminia’s origins.
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Analisia Gutierrez: What was it about comic books that draws you in?
Mickey Martinez: My background is in film. I graduated as a major in broadcast media where I took a lot of film courses there at UIW in San Antonio. When I got married, I moved out to LA where I got a job at a distribution and production company. I worked there for about 5 to 6 years, screen-writing some and learning how expensive it is to produce films. This experience is what ultimately drove me to comics. You need less money to get comics done.
With the first issue of Quetzalcoatl I worked closely with the artist, Anna Maria Richardson, to break down my ideas and the plot into its visual elements that would shape the story—and convey all of its emotions.
AG: Has using Kickstarter helped as far as raising money on your projects?
MM: Kickstarter’s a learning process. While three of us co-creators read comics, we’d never created a comic before. While we had enough to launch the Kickstarter at the tail end of the campaign, the pandemic happened. Those interested in publishing our book and comic book stores who were going to sell our comic all went out of business. Ditto for the printers that were going to print the comic. Everything went out the window. It took us a long time to get issue #1 out but once we did, it was for all the backers. We didn’t have enough money to get them into stores.
We knew we needed to create a volume that people could hold in their hands and that we could get into the libraries, schools (especially bilingual schools), and bookstores. So, we decided to launch another Kickstarter.
AG: Where do you want the series and projects to go from here?
MM: My co-creator, Sam Jimenez, and I want to continue to use comics to modernize the many Mesoamerican myths and tales with their creatures, gods and goddesses. For instance, there’s the tale “Xiuhtecuti” about two lovers that were torn apart, died next one another, then grew into mountains. That’s what we are into: modernizing our ancient myths and tales in comics to celebrate them and spread them as wide as possible.
AG: How did you come to know about these myths and stories?
MM: I grew up hearing these stories from my dad who was born in Mexico. I thought that he made up some of them. But when I grew up, I would hear others also talk about stories, realizing that they weren’t my dad’s inventions. Later I would conduct research to understand the importance of the stories to our people; and, how and why they have been told throughout history.
AG: Can you speak to other insights gained from this research?
MM: During the conquest, the Spanish tried to impose their Catholic saints on the Mesoamerican gods. The Spaniards tried to convince the indigenous people that Quetzalcóatl was the devil, and not a good god. The Spaniards either tried to turn the Mesoamerican people against their own gods—or to replace completely their gods with Christian saints. That is, they tried to suppress the indigenous cultures and their way of seeing and understanding the world. In the comic we are very literal about how Christianity tried to suppress these gods.
“I like maximalism. I don’t like subtlety.”
AG: Who is your ideal reader and what do you want them to take away from your series?
MM: I think it has two ideal readers: One who is lightly of aware of these mythologies and wants know more; and one who knows a lot about this historical period, including Spanish colonization of indigenous peoples. For instance, in issue #3 we have a luchador who fights supernatural creatures, but does so with a rosary wrapped tightly around his fists. We wanted to be very literal to draw in people who didn’t know much about this period of Spanish colonization and conquest.
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AG: Was the horror genre a big influence?
MM: I like horror movies, because of how big they are in metaphors. Quetzalcoatl isn’t a horror story per se, but it does include horror elements. It’s maximalistic like the horror genre. It was through writing horror that I taught myself how to be very loud with my metaphors. I like maximalism. I don't like subtlety.
AG: In terms of your legacy and impact on the comic book world, how would you want to be remembered?
MM: I want other comics creators to know that it’s okay to be loud and direct and to do so across the whole comic. That it’s okay to be maximalistic—as long as you actually have something to say.
AG: What’s your origin story, Mickey?
MM: I experienced a lot of trauma and had to learn how to persevere and come out the other end of it. My origin story’s like a horror film. I had weird, dark, and surreal things happen that I knew I had to get through and come out the other side. Writing through trauma has been important for me. It was a way to find my strength to survive.
AG: Is the creating of Quetzalcoatl also a form of healing?
MM: All the stories I write are about healing. Herminia’s not close to her family. Her entire family unit is broken and the only person she’s close to is her grandmother then she dies. She has to come to terms with how to survive on her own in this world.
Sometimes it's not about healing relationships, it's about healing yourself. Only then can one begin a healing relationship with another person.
AG: Quetzalcoatl is at once similar and different to mainstream superhero comics like Spider-Man?
MM: Herminia is different in that her journey is anchored in our Latin American beliefs, history, languages, and culture. Quetzalcoatl feeds off this collective sense of the past and points us to the future. So while Quetzalcoatl is like Spider-Man stories that invite us to reflect on our own lives as we follow Parker’s adventures in a specific time and place, we want readers to connect to our Latinx myths and how they continue to exist in vital ways in our lives today.