Manuel Martínez Nazario is a man on a mission: to share stories of Puerto Rico in comic book form. “I want researchers to start wondering ‘What is going on in Puerto Rico? What can I see through the comic books?’” The answer is plenty: “History, sociology, fantasy, whatever you want,” he said.
“¡Wepa! Puerto Ricans in the World of Comics,” which opens Oct. 4 in New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, is built on his decades-long collection and his vast knowledge. Nazario, who was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Puerto Rico, said that in 2021, he was thunderstruck one day when he was staring at his walk-in closet: It was jampacked with 14 bins of comics. “This is too many comic books,” he said, and too few people knew what was available.
His collection of fanzines, political cartoons, comic books and original artwork are all linked by Puerto Rico: The creators and characters are from there or the stories are about the island.
He has also been a frequent source for comics researchers at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where he was a librarian from 1995 until his retirement in 2024.
Nazario was inspired to find a place to donate his comics and make them more accessible. His ¡wepa! moment — a word used to express joy in Puerto Rican Spanish — came when he contacted the library. “They responded immediately,” he said.
His collection, displayed on his dining room table, was assessed virtually — Nazario had organized online presentations of the comics in the past — and two vendors visited his home to send the comics to New York. He was impressed with the resources spent on getting the comics to New York: “They did not send the collection on a ship, they sent it on an airplane,” he said, and it arrived overnight.
The initial set was around 1,400 comics, but is now about 1,600 because Nazario is still collecting and donating. “I sent a second group of comic books and a huge amount of original art,” he said. Many of the creators started giving him original drawings because, he said, they know he is serious about preserving their work.
The specificity of the collection was a welcome surprise to Paloma Celis Carbajal, a curator at the library, who organized the exhibition with Charles Cuykendall Carter, an assistant curator. Both are comic book aficionados. Carbajal admired Nazario’s focus on Puerto Rico. “I had never seen that approach before in the way of collecting comics,” she said in an interview.
After immersing themselves in the material, the curators arrived at four areas of focus for the exhibition, which runs through March 8, and is a bilingual presentation.
In the category La Isla (the Island), visitors will meet Coquí, a hero who survives an accident when he is saved by a coquí tree frog that grants him powers. It is a derivative superhero origin, sure, “but in terms of quality, it could absolutely be published by Marvel,” Carter said. Carbajal noted that the comic reflects how many of the younger generation speak today. “He’s constantly making jokes in Spanish or starts in English and finishes in Spanish,” she said.
A Nueva York section spotlights the White Tiger, the first Puerto Rican super hero published by Marvel in 1975. The section also highlights the work of Angelo Torres, an artist and caricaturist whose work was featured in Mad Magazine from 1969-2010.
“Guailí: el pequeño Taíno,” by Alice Vanessa Falto Ayala, looks at El Pasado (the Past). It is a story about the Taíno, the Indigenous people of Puerto Rico, aimed at younger readers. (It sometimes throws in words like “bibi,” the Taíno word for mother.) The inclusion of “Guailí” has a real life twist: “The artist had given up and was no longer publishing,” Carbajal said. But when she learned her work was going to be exhibited, it inspired her to continue.
The concluding section, Otros Mundos (Other Worlds), has superhero, samurai and street dog stories. One standout is from Soda Pop Comics, founded in 2007 by Rosa Colón Guerra and Carla Rodríguez, to encourage women to create comics. Rosa “would go to the comic fairs and they’d say ‘Comics aren’t for girls. Why are you here?’,” Carter said. The women took it upon themselves to change that and released the Soda Pop Anthology in 2014 which featured the work of 26 female artists.
Guerra will take part in a panel at New York Comic Con on Oct. 9, along with Nazario and the show’s curators. But Nazario is most excited about the opening of the comics show. “I’m going to be at the New York Public Library building Saturday at 10 o’clock because I want to be the first one to see the exhibition,” he said.
¡Wepa! Puerto Ricans in the World of Comics
The Wachenheim Gallery at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building; Oct. 4-March 8, 2026.
George Gene Gustines has been writing about comic books for The Times for more than two decades.
The post Seeing Puerto Rico Through Comic Books appeared first on New York Times.
