Will Ibañez’s story begins en el otro lado, when his father Guillermo returned to Puebla after working in pizza shops in New York City in the 1980s. He convinced his wife, Leonides, to stop being a doctor and go with him to Laredo to open a pizza shop called Sal’s, short for salvador, the savior.
Ibañez wanted to be an artist. “I always liked to draw, and I knew comics needed people to draw them,” he said. His mother supported him from an early age, and his father kept him in art supplies. Comics, Cards, & Collectibles was a local source of comics, and Ibañez kept up with SciFi Channel’s The Anti-Gravity Room that featured comic artists, writers, and publishers.
By eighth grade Ibañez was selling his own mini-comics for a quarter. “They were pencil-drawn, hand-stapled comics of toilet humor. I might have even used the school library’s copier.” When a friend wanted to show him a hilarious comic circulated at school, he was handed his own comic. It was then he knew he could entertain through his art. He later realized his comics could explore something deeper.
His father moved Sal’s Pizza from Mall del Norte to a San Bernardo location, where today you can still buy one of the best pizzas in Laredo. He opened La China Poblana restaurant at the mall, and young Will delivered to-go orders there after school, and often stopped in at the newly relocated Comics, Cards, & Collectibles to look through the store’s dollar boxes of indie comics. He fell in love with Milk & Cheese, Eightball, Optic Nerve, Zero-Zero, Love & Rockets, and Slacker Comics, beginning to realize that comics could be more than superhero stories.
He felt he could accomplish more through an accessible medium like comics because they were for the everyday person. In the personal stories of comics, he believed young artists could discuss the world and their place in it.
Seminal titles like Spiegelman’s MAUS showed him the power of comics and the works of indie creators like the Hernandez Bros. Comics from the black and white boom of the 1980s, and the emerging hardcore music scene at Sal’s Pizza influenced Ibañez’s artistic direction.
As he noted that the representations of Latinos in the 1980s and 90s were stereotypes, he aimed to show that they didn’t capture the complexity of border culture.
He was accepted to the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City in 2001, earning a degree in Cartooning & Comics. Founded by Burne Hogarth (Tarzan of the Apes), SVA was his first choice because of its renowned history and talented faculty. Though surrounded by skilled artists who had deeper understandings of anatomy and theory, Ibañez felt “in his place.” In SVA’s extensive library of trade paperback collections, he finally read his favorite indie and underground titles in their proper order. He became more heavily influenced by artists like the Hernandez Bros. and Robert Crumb.
Crumb’s work encouraged Ibañez to create stories that went beyond stereotypes of the border and its people. He said that the punks and metalheads that filled Sal’s on weekends were living examples of the frontera’s unique culture. With his backlog of boyhood border stories, he wrote Blazing Quantum: True Tales from la Frontera, which disproved stereotypical caricatures.
The six issues he published represented 20 years of work. While Blazing Quantum didn’t sell well initially, it has been featured in Comic Book Resources, The Comics Alternative podcast, and Cartoonist Kayfabe. It can be found in the Small Press Expo, Forbidden Planet NYC, and his website keopsibanez.com.
He has since co-created Codex of the Jaguar, which he pencils, inks, letters, storyboards, and co-writes. The move away from indie comics was a way to push himself artistically since indie comics are often more story-driven without requiring as many artistic techniques as a title like Codex requires.
Artistic expansion is vital to his own artwork and that of new artists. He said comic artists need an education in anatomy, perspective, and storytelling.
Ibañez lives in the northeast where he raises two sons, and continues to tell the stories of la frontera, “Laredo still feels like home,” he said, reflecting on the City’s growth since the early 2000s. “The artists of Laredo are in the good hands of likeminded people fostering artistic expression,” he noted.
Some may trace their interest in the arts back to Sal’s Pizza — its influence still resonates — though its stage went quiet years ago.
(Mario E. Martinez is a novelist and short story writer from Laredo. He is the author of Ashtree, NEO-Laredo, and The Chickens That Are Not Her Chickens. To find more of his work, go to marioemartinez.squarespace.com)
