NYCC 2022 Interview: Kayden Phoenix on A La Brava

A La Brava, the first fully Latina superhero team, explained

A La Brava is a superhero comic created by Kayden Phoenix and made entirely by Latina artists, from pencils to colors to letters. It has drawn national attention for that reason, with coverage from Eye Witness News and the Los Angeles Times. The book follows five heroes who each get an origin story before they unite as a team.

Phoenix talked about it at New York Comic Con 2022, where the book was on offer for attendees looking for something new. The conversation, edited for clarity in its original form, is the source for most of what follows.

Her motivation is stated plainly in her Los Angeles Times interview: audiences have seen those stories before, she said, but never the female story, never the Latina story, never their version of it. The comic is meant as a modern voice for marginalized Latine readers, led by an all-Latina art team.

That team includes Eva Cabrera, a GLAAD and Eisner-nominated illustrator who worked on the Santa and Loquita issues, and newcomer Amanda Julina Gonzalez, who illustrated Jalisco and Ruca. Phoenix publishes the book through Phoenix Studios.

How A La Brava began

Phoenix describes herself as an independent screenwriter, and the book began as a dream in 2019. She wanted to see a Latina superhero team on the big screen, and she still notes that there is not one with an origin story of her own. She wrote the original screenplay and shot a short film as a sizzle reel.

Everyone who saw the sizzle asked for a comic book, which she did not have. Eventually she made a graphic novel about her superhero and then expanded it into five heroes. Her reason was representation, and she is clear that she still wants a Latina hero on screen, whether it is hers or not.

A comic book historian later told her A La Brava was the first Latina team in comic book history, which she had not set out to be. The claim is the creator's own and the historian's, and it is the line the coverage repeats.

Why five heroes instead of one

The book opens as five separate origin stories, each with its own character arc, before the heroes come together as A La Brava. Phoenix's own account suggests the structure grew out of her screen ambitions. She started with one hero, Jalisco, and widened the book to five. Coverage of the series adds that five characters gave her a better chance that at least one would reach the big screen.

The structure also lets her give each hero a different corner of the Latina diaspora. A Mexican dancer, a Texas border-town girl, a Miami detective with Puerto Rican and Cuban roots, an East Los Angeles Chicana and a Dominican gunslinger from New York do not share one story, and Phoenix does not try to flatten them into one.

The all-Latina creative team

Asked about her development team, Phoenix said she was lucky. People who open A La Brava usually remark first on how pretty it is or how good the colors are, and she credits that work to her penciler and colorist. Every role, including lettering, is held by a Latina artist.

Shared understanding speeds the work up. If she mentions femicide, she says, she does not have to explain it to her artists, who know the subject and why it matters for women in general.

The five heroes of A La Brava

The heroes come from different heritages, which Phoenix insists on, because the Latina diaspora differs from culture to culture. Jalisco is a traditional Mexican dancer with blades that emerge from her dress, and she takes on femicide. The rest are American Latinas.

Santa is a border-town girl from Texas who lives in a made-up town called Wexo and takes on a corrupt politician named Ice who is running for mayor. Her powers are divine strength and deja vu. Loquita is a Puerto Rican and Cuban teen detective from Miami who can see demons, ghosts, goblins and ghouls, and can share that sight by touching your shoulder.

Ruca is a Chicana from East Los Angeles, Phoenix's own home, with instant karma: whatever you give her, good or bad, she throws back. Bandita is a Dominican gunslinger from New York who can ricochet bullets off walls and infiltrates a Broadway theater group to take it down.

A La Brava heroes at a glance

Kayden Phoenix interview recap: lessons for new comic creators

The hardest part, Phoenix said, was simply life. She started in September 2019, just before the pandemic, and was taking network meetings and had been invited to WonderCon and San Diego Comic-Con through Instagram when everything stopped. Money stopped flowing too, and she still had to keep creating books and paying her artists.

That honest detail shapes her advice. She offers two points to anyone starting a comic. First, find your tribe: there will always be people who believe in you and in the mission. Second, keep going, no matter what. Money and pandemics hit everyone, she said, and you find a way to persevere.

For readers deciding whether to pick up A La Brava, the interview makes the pitch simple. Five origin stories, five heritages, a creator who built it from a screenplay that Hollywood did not make, and a team of artists who needed no briefing on the subjects the book tackles. The book is sold at LatinaSuperheroes.com, which also has an Instagram account.

The format of the conversation is worth a note. It is a short Q&A with a creator who answers in complete thoughts, covering what the book is, who makes it, what was hardest, who the characters are and what she would tell a beginner. Those five questions are the ones a curious reader would ask in order, and the answers are specific enough to act on.

Phoenix herself comes from the world she writes about. She is a Chicana writer and director from East Los Angeles, and she gave Ruca her own home turf. Several heroes also carry a real-world cause: Jalisco confronts femicide and Santa takes on a corrupt politician. The comic wears its themes openly, and the interview shows that this is a choice and not an accident.

The pandemic detail deserves a second look. Phoenix describes taking network meetings and receiving convention invitations at the very moment when the world shut down. A reader skimming the headline about a first-ever team might miss that the book survived a pause with no income at all, which is a more useful story for aspiring creators than any milestone.

What the interview does not do is prove the first-ever claim, and it does not need to. The claim is carried by Phoenix and a comic historian she cites, and what Phoenix emphasizes is the work: five stories on the page, a team of Latina artists and a persistent creator.