Building beetle ofa
With the new Blue Beetle movie in cinemas now, comics artist Cully Hamner talks about designing the new version of the classic dc hero.
THE pronunciation of Jaime Reyes’ first-name really matters. It’s pronounced “hi-me,” and not (as I initially thought) “jay-me.”
Reyes is the alter ego of the titular superhero in DC Studios’ new film Blue Beetle, which opened in cinemas last week. Starring Xolo Maridueña of Cobra Kai fame and directed by Ángel Manuel Soto, it’s the first major superhero film with significant Latino representation.
The Blue Beetle is a mid-level character created in the 1930s by Charles Nicholas during comic books’ Golden Age. By the end of the 1960s, there’d been a couple different versions of the character, his alter ego, origin story, powers and even publisher.
In 2006, DC Comics wanted to reboot Blue Beetle. They tapped writers John Rogers and Keith Giffen and artist Cully Hamner, and they updated the character as a Mexican-american teen with a high-tech/high-powered armored suit, obtained through the possession of an extraterrestrial scarab, a beetle-shaped amulet. The character became a member of iconic superhero teams Justice League and Teen Titans.
The Blue Beetle film cast also boasts the legendary Susan Sarandon as villain Victoria Kord, Raoul Max Trujillo as baddie Conrad Carapax, comedian George Lopez as Jaime’s uncle and Rudy Damián Alcázar as Jaime’s father Alberto.
During his career, Hamner has drawn A-list heroes including Batman, Green Lantern, X-men, Daredevil, Silver Surfer and many others.
He also co-created RED, a 2003 comic-book mini-series later made into a hit action film with Bruce Willis starring as protagonist Frank Moses, a retired CIA agent out for revenge.
The following is an excerpt of an interview Hamner did with Al.com on how he came up with the design for the new Blue Beetle.
Getting the call
My career at that point was kind of at an ebb, in my opinion – like I was not sure if I wanted to stay in comics and I wasn’t sure if there was a place for me, really. And Dan Didio – who had recently taken a job as vice president at DC and started taking over editorial — came up to me and introduced himself at a convention.
He said, “Hey, I really like your work and I want to keep you around,” which was a big thing to me, because I sort of felt like I was out of favour at DC. But you know, as happens, a new regime comes in and they decide they want to shake things up.
So, it wasn’t too long after that, that I got a call from Mark Chiarello, who was the art director in DC at the time, asking me if I wanted to help design a new Blue Beetle.
And at that point, I liked the Ted Kord (alter ego character version of ) Blue Beetle fine. I was a fan of the (Keith) Giffen, (J.M.)
Dematteis, (Kevin Maguire) Justice League comics (which featured Blue Beetle as part of that superhero team), so I knew the character.
Working with the writers
I didn’t quite understand at first that they (DC) wanted to new character to have the name Blue Beetle, but they didn’t really necessarily want to have any connection to the previous versions of the character.
They had a script already that John Rogers and Keith Giffen had written. Mostly it was on the page, as far as the dynamics of the family and who Jaime was and who his friends were.
But they just didn’t know how the character looked. I had some sort of vague direction that they wanted the character to have sort of an armor like appearance or a technological kind of event, because he got his suit that he wears from this alien scarab, right?
They’d had a couple of other artists do passes on it, and it seemed to me that they were directed towards doing sort of a Japanese robot, kind of a kaiju kind of look, which I thought, “That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.” You have to keep the humanity in the character – not just in the way he’s written, but the way he looks. He’s got to look like a person.
And no one’s gonna want to draw a robot, like a complicated robot, every month in a comic book. You can’t make your deadlines that way. So, I steered it back towards a more kind of the superhero aspect of it.
I wanted to keep more of a human shape. Silhouette is very important to me when designing a character. And I wanted to lean into the beetle-ness of it, because the character’s name is Blue Beetle but there’s nothing beetleish about this outfit at all.
Cultural connection
I also wanted to lean into his culture. It was very specific, how his family and his culture was depicted in the script.
Also, it was set in El Paso, which as you know, is right on the border. The Mexican presence in El Paso is heavy. It permeates the entire city, that entire area.
Also, I looked at a lot of pictures of beetles, and the thing that struck me was the kind of pincer thing that you see. I wanted him to have that to give him that recognizable silhouette. And my idea was to make it sort of a backpack. If you look at my original designs, which you can find online, you’ll see that I’ve written on there “bug pack,” because that’s what my name for it when I was designing this thing.
I basically wanted to look like a beetle is kind of holding onto his back. And you had these pincers and have arcs of electricity or whatever that, you know, jump between them and everything. It’s kind of a cool, distinctive effect.
But also with the suit’s face, I wanted to give it sort of a luchador (Mexican pro wrestling mask) motif to it, which gave it a hint of connection to Mexican culture in our superhero kind of way.
So that’s what we ended up with. The design that I handed in, is almost probably 99 percent the design that you see in the comics today. The only note that the art director had was to add some sort of graphic to his chest, and I added that to basically give at least some connection to the other Blue Beetles.
What’s next?
Right now, I’m doing a book, a creator owned series with (accomplished comic book writer and best-selling author) Greg Rucka for Image (Comics). I’m not going to make an announcement as to the title or anything like that yet, because I think they’re going to be rolling out an announcement at some point. But that’s what I’m working on right now.
Greg is someone I did (DC character) The Question with, and we’ve worked really well together on some other things. And this is a thing that we’re doing that has a real commentary on society to it, but it’s also just balls-out action. If you liked our Question work, you’re gonna like this.
And I’m still doing a lot of covers for Marvel and DC and Boom and all these other kinds of companies. I’m sure that once I’m finished with this series that I’m doing, I’ll probably turn right around and do something at one the big two again. It just depends. – al.com/tribune News Service