As comic books evolve, New Mexico artists and shops find their place

Andy Kuhn stepped into his home studio in Albuquerque last week, switched on his drawing board lights and inked the final playing card-sized page layouts for Wild Animals, a comic about a young man who becomes hell-bent on revenge after crooked cops kill his father.

Thematically, his new project with Mad Cave Studios is a far cry from the star-spangled superhero serials he read in high school. But he says the graphic novel anthology coming out this fall is still firmly rooted in the tried-and-true comic book — whose emphasis on storytelling through art and action continues to find new subjects and readers in an increasingly digital age.

“It’s not a book, it’s not a movie, but it has elements of both of those,” Kuhn said. “A lot of people get into comics because of superheroes — they like Spider-Man or whatever their character is. But for me, it’s about the form, you know?”

Since their panel-to-panel speech bubble style was first developed by daily newspapers in the 19th century, comics have consistently proven a versatile medium.

Plucky protagonists and Sunday funnies evolved into the now iconic Golden Age comic book heroes of Batman and Superman in the 1930s. The rise of more mature, politically and socially charged superhero stories in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s elevated the medium’s literary status, at times drawing controversy for exploring themes such as substance abuse, race and sexuality.

Today, the comic book industry finds itself in a state of transformational growth, marked by digital adaptation and the staying power of the comic book’s emergent form: the graphic novel.

A market once dominated by single-issue “floppies” sold inside convenience stores has tilted toward the standalone, complete narratives and refined artistry of graphic novels, now also a popular storytelling standard for autobiographical memoirs, sci-fi and horror. Classic literary works such as “The Odyssey,” “The Great Gatsby” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” have been adapted into graphic novels.

Kevin Drennan, owner of Big Adventure Comics on Guadalupe Street in Santa Fe, said this shift partly informs his shop’s aesthetic. As a kid growing up in Houston, Drennan said that when he wasn’t picking up copies of “The Incredible Hulk” from 7-Eleven spinner racks, he hung out at a local bookstore.

“The owner was a big original feminist equal rights amendment leader in town,” he said, “and a lot of that organization back in the ’70s happened in this particular bookstore she owned. I’ve always seen the bookstore as this kind of central community space from the very beginning of my life.”

On a Wednesday afternoon in July, Drennan was eager to talk Superman, who received a cinematic reboot this year starring David Corenswet as the Man of Steel and Rachel Brosnahan as his partner in journalism and crimefighting.

“People are responding really well to the more bright Boy Scout Superman that we have in this movie, but it still makes points about business and money and power vis-à-vis Lex Luthor,” Drennan said. “It’s interesting, right?”

The reboot has widely been lauded as a success for DC Studios on the heels of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, which have generated more than $30 billion at the worldwide box office, according to The Walt Disney Co.

Just as graphic novels elevated comic books into the higher echelons of the literary world, Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” trilogy of films is widely credited as demonstrating that superheroes can serve as complex protagonists on the silver screen.

Owing to its film tax rebate program and diverse geography of high alpine areas, panoramic deserts and steep canyons, New Mexico has long been a draw for filmmakers, including those featuring superheroes: 1978’s “Superman” starring Christopher Reeves and more recently “The Avengers,” “Batman v Superman” and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” all filmed scenes in the Land of Enchantment.

But superheroes’ adaptation to movies and other digital formats, like video games, doesn’t always translate to greater sales of the source material itself, Drennan said.

“Robert Downey Jr. was everybody’s giant love in the (Marvel Cinematic Universe), but I sell like eight copies of ‘Iron Man’ a month,” Drennan said. “It’s one of my worst-performing books, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad, right?”

Chris Losack, owner of Astro-Zombies on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, credits the comic book industry’s staying power to digital mediums that introduce superheroes to new fans.

“They definitely feed each other,” he said. “We still have 300-plus subscribers to books on a weekly basis. Every time a new movie comes out, we’ll get a little surge in popularity.”

Losack’s shop embraces the adaptability of the superhero in 2025, with comics, toys and collectibles covering the shop from floor to ceiling.

“I try to have something for everybody,” he said. “We don’t want to be gatekeeping. ‘Oh, you didn’t know that Amazing Fantasy #15 was the first Spider-Man?’ That’s not what we’re looking for. We want to hang out and talk to people who don’t know about this stuff.”

Reading for pleasure declined among Americans by 28% from 2004 to 2023, according to researchers at the University College London and the University of Florida, but some believe comics can offer an entry point into the literary world.

“I grew up in Grants, and I was at school when a teacher caught me reading Wolverine,” said Will Antonio, a comic book collector and part-time Astro-Zombies employee. “She was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m reading comic books.’ She said, ‘Well, that’s reading.’”

Printing costs in the U.S. have roughly doubled since the pandemic, Kodak Executive Chairman and CEO Jim Continenza wrote in an Aug. 20 article, placing additional economic pressures on the book, newspaper, magazine and comic book industries.

Losack says plenty of his customers have become more selective about purchasing physical comics that they can also read on a tablet. But he expects there will always be a market for physical media.

“Some of it’s nostalgia,” he said, “like when I was a kid, sitting down with a comic book to read it. But there’s also the real tactile function of a book. I mean, why do people still play golf as opposed to just a video game? It’s kind of the same thing. Reading a comic book online, you miss stuff because you don’t get those big splash pages. You have to zoom in to see the details.”

While attending Indiana University’s Herron School of Art + Design in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Kuhn said his professors viewed comics as an illegitimate art form. For a while, he traded his pencil and pen for a paintbrush.

“Their mission was to beat the cartoonist out of you,” he said, laughing.

After graduating, he took a job as a copy messenger at the Indianapolis Star, where he would comment on comic strips the paper was considering. One day in the newsroom, he found a brush tip marker on an editor’s desk, picked it up and started drawing a comic book villain’s face.

“That little tool reignited my fire to get back into being a cartoonist and start making comics again,” he said.

Over the course of a more than 25-year career, Kuhn’s had the opportunity to draw some of his favorite heroes — Conan, most of the main Marvel characters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman.

“But if the opportunity ever arose to draw a ‘Hellboy’ comic, I would jump at the opportunity to do that,” he said. “I’m an insanely huge Mike Mignola fan. He’s a genius-level cartoonist. Just the entire aesthetic of the comic, the stories — it’s all just great.”