Gilbert Hernandez

We were very happy when a South African court, which had previously ruled against us, took another look and decided that this material was not obscene and allowed it into the country.

I always felt I was living in two worlds. One was the Mexican world, because nearly everybody I knew, relatives and cousins and kids in the neighbourhood, were Mexican. Then school was a different world. It was ethnically mixed.

I’ve sort of dealt with the characters’ lives more; particularly the women characters.

My two biggest influences are Archie comics and Dennis the Menace.

Our father died when we were very young, so our mother raised six kids. We saw the world filtered through her eyes, being a minority woman raising six kids.

We grew out of the superhero comics, but we still liked comics, so we started putting our own experiences in the stories we were doing for our own amusement.

We thought everybody read comics. We didn’t know we were weird. We didn’t know people that collected comics were strange. It was as normal as listening to rock music on the radio.

It wasn’t until school that we realised that we were abnormal.

Dennis the Menace was probably the most realistic comic book ever done. No space aliens ever invaded!