Contrasting the careers of Natacha Bustos and Javier Garrón…

Episode 2 of Marvel 616 raised the bar. It delivered a vision of Marvel and, indeed, artistry and comics which was inclusive and broad. Yet it also lacked punch because we didn’t see the struggles of those who hold the pen.

Episode 3, specifically about artists and their journeys, delivers all of what I felt was missing in episode 2.

This documentary focuses primarily on the lives of two artists, Natacha Bustos and Javier Garrón who are the artists for Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur and Miles Morales respectively.

We find out how they came into the industry, what their routes to being artists were and we also discover how they managed to end up working for Marvel.

This could have been a sugary syrup of telling us how amazing both the artists and Marvel are. Except it isn’t. The director, Clay Jeter, takes us along with them, showing where they struggled, where they almost quit along with where they triumphed. And through these brutally honest recounting of their stories we gain a huge amount of insight.

Neither of the two artists took what you might call a traditional route into comics – certainly not a stereotype. Both have a smattering of architectural training (both having started out training to be architects) and both realised it wasn’t going to work. For Bustos, she ended up doing fine art. Garrón went in an entirely different direction and it took him years of trying before he ended up drawing comics.

What amazed me about this episode (and which I again watched with my daughter) was that the issues they faced weren’t simply ones  of whether they were good enough – they were also about the stories they wanted to tell.

Gustos is a woman of multiple heritages and Garrón is Spanish. Neither of them are traditional old school White American males and Gustos in particular tells of racial prejudice and racist abuse.

Fascinatingly, Marvel has put C.B. Cebulski, the Editor in Chief onto the screen to lay out their vision and it couldn’t be clearer. To paraphrase a longer quote, ‘back in the day, Marvel made comics about what it knew – and it was drawn by white men so it drew stuff they knew. Now? Now we have people working all over the world and we see that reflected on the page and in our stories.’ It’s a statement which couldn’t make me any happier.

There’s also a gentle exploration of the kick back to having a Black Spider-Man as well as clear evidence of the difference it made to many, many people to suddenly see themselves represented in the books for the first time.

Prof John Jennings underscores why this is so important both for Marvel but for all of us. He calls stories  ‘empathy technology’ and in so doing unlocks why seeing people like you but also different to you in the stories we engage with is so important – because it unlocks our ability to empathise.

As Cebulski says, the furore about Miles Morales died away, their fans came around or new ones came along and, perhaps just as importantly, the fans of Moon Girl wrote to Marvel in their droves and they wrote saying they wanted to be like Moongirl. For young Black women and other PoC this is literally groundbreaking.

What’s extra lovely about the show is how it contrasts the lives of Bustos and Garrón. They have different approaches to working, to how they draw, to how they see their place but they are united in their commitment to their art, to showing their hearts in every stroke of the pen and in working so, so hard.

Verdict: The message is clear – there’s no one shape who is a comic book artist. There’s passion and love and commitment but these come in different sizes with all their attendant frustrations, struggles and fears. However, more than that, it’s a public statement from Marvel that this is their future and their commitment and this is a wonderful thing to see. 

My rating: 10 Moon Girls out of 10.

Stewart Hotston