‘Baldo,’ Comic Strip With Latino Focus, Gains National Exposure

Baldo wears an earring and loose clothes. He daydreams of cars and girls. He’s a typical American teenager.

Baldo also has brown skin and is a comic-strip character. His name is short for Baldomero--a “funny” name given him by traditional Latino parents--and he is sometimes caught up in scenes that highlight his bicultural life, much like those experienced by many Latinos in the United States.

When Baldo has to translate for a friend’s relative, for example, he struggles because his Spanish isn’t very polished, just as many younger-generation Spanish speakers do as they begin to lose the language.

“Baldo”--the only nationally syndicated comic strip to focus on Latinos in America, launches today in about 100 newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Tribune. Papers in the region that will at some point carry the Universal Press Syndicate strip include the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Press-Telegram in Long Beach, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, the Ventura County Star and the Ontario Daily Bulletin.

Along with Baldo Bermudez, the strip features his younger sister, Gracie; his father, known just as “Dad”; and Tia Carmen, Aunt Carmen.

Some elements of “Baldo” are kept intentionally vague. For instance, though Baldo is Latino, his specific ethnicity is not known. Other questions are also not answered even in the minds of the authors, like what happened to Baldo’s mother or where the family lives.

The authors say the vagueness wasn’t an attempt to conform to editors’ perceptions of what a Latino strip should be; rather, it was to give themselves room for story lines--like exploring the relationship between a father and son--says Dallas-based Hector Cantu, 38, who writes the strip with his partner, illustrator Carlos Castellanos, 39, who lives in West Palm Beach, Fla.

The syndicate saw in “Baldo” not only a tool to target a potential market of 30 million Latinos but also a funny cartoon.

“It’s one thing to have a strip where the characters might fit into a Latino setting. It’s quite another to have a Latino comic strip,” said Lee Salem, editor of Universal Press Syndicate. “We are going for the former.”

Some of the current crop of mainstream strips have Latino characters in minor roles--such as “Zits,” which includes a character named Hector. But some Latino artists see this as tokenism and compare it to Hollywood’s often criticized attempts at diversity.

Just like the African American cartoonists who broke the color barrier in the comics pages in recent years, Latino artists have long tried to do the same.

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Among the earliest such comics to run successfully in mainstream dailies was “Gordo”--a strip now considered by some as much too stereotypical to be successful in today’s politically aware environment. It was created by Gus Arriola and was syndicated from 1941 to 1985. The character Gordo--which literally means “Fat”--was a heavyset Mexican hombre who wore a big mustache and sombrero, and drove a bus he called “El Cometa Haley”--Haley’s Comet.

“Baldo” will be the first since “Gordo.”

Other artists are finding success without the help of syndicates, which act as sales representatives for the comics in their stable. Los Angeles cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz is also launching a comic strip today, although his “La Cucaracha” is self-syndicated and, so far, has been picked up only by the northern edition of the Albuquerque Journal.

Alcaraz--who has won multiple awards from the L.A. Press Club for his agitative political cartoon the “L.A. Cucaracha,” which runs in the L.A. Weekly--has not had as warm a reception as “Baldo’s” creators from syndicates, although at least one is still considering his strip. The “La Cucaracha” strip is a variation of the L.A. Weekly cartoon tailored for mainstream daily newspapers. It features the adventures of Eddie Lopez, a Mexican American editor of the East Los Times, and his pet, a cockroach. Alcaraz’s style is pull-no-punches social and political commentary.

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He and other self-syndicated artists, such as Pete Ramirez of New York, complain that some syndicate editors dismiss them because their characters are too specifically defined--too ethnic, for instance--or not ethnic enough--and don’t seem to be open to the artists’ interpretations of their own communities.

“They don’t want them to be a specific nationality. That is a problem,” says Alcaraz, 35, whose strips are also available on https://www.pocho.com by clicking the cartoonista link. “If you have a real vision about your comic strip and you meet these editors, some of them will tell you, ‘Make them generic.’ ”

But the syndicates must reconcile different interests, from artists’ styles to the needs of newspapers. “Newspapers are a broad-based form of communication. If we provide comic strips for narrow segments of readership, we probably won’t serve the interests of newspapers,” says Universal’s Salem.

Ramirez, 39, a former New York police officer, self-syndicated his strip in January. So far, 17 newspapers--the Rocky Mountain News in Denver being the largest of them--have picked up his “Raising Hector,” including L.A.’s Spanish-language daily La Opinion. (Most such Latino strips are in English but can be translated for Spanish publications, as Universal Press Syndicate is doing with “Baldo” for some of its clients.)

In Ramirez’s strip--also available on https://www.raisinghector.com--three generations of Hector Sanchez’s middle-class family try to reconcile traditional Latino culture--represented by the grandparents--with American ways of life: In one story line, Hector’s mother works and his father stays home.

Self-syndication hasn’t hurt Orange County artist Martha Montoya, who has sold her “Los Kitos”--a strip whose characters look like walking M&Ms; that convey inspirational messages taken from Latino culture--to 284 newspapers around the world, including one in Sweden.

To be sure, the odds are against anyone trying to gain syndication. Universal Press, for instance, gets about 30 unsolicited submissions a week and syndicates only two or three new strips a year. The overwhelming number of submissions are not from minority artists.

Cantu, who is Mexican American, and Castellanos, who is Cuban American, said they were pleasantly surprised at the letters of interest they received from several syndicates.

It had only been two years ago that Cantu, an assistant features editor at the Dallas Morning News and a former managing editor at the Santa Barbara-based Hispanic Business magazine, enlisted freelance artist Castellanos for the business venture.

“The newspaper comic strip [industry] is very conservative still,” says Castellanos. “If you’re an artist [who’s] maybe too edgy, maybe you’re better off looking for a market that’s open to the things you want to create.”

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Syndicates say the formula is not too complex: good writing, art and humor--and potential appeal to large masses.

“You have to have situations that everyone can understand,” agrees Phil Roman, a well-respected Latino animator, whose credits include production of Fox Network’s “The Simpsons” and “King of the Hill,” while leading his Film Roman Inc. “A lot of things that have happened to Latinos have happened to others. It has to have that crossover to the broad market.”

Will the introduction of Baldo help pave the way?

Baldo’s “going to open some doors,” Ramirez says. “Let’s just hope [the syndicates] don’t think they have one [Latino strip] so they don’t need any others.”

Jose Cardenas can be reached by e-mail at jose.cardenas@latimes.com.