Pride Month Creator Spotlight: Luciano Vecchio

While you are likely aware that June is Pride Month Pride thanks to all the corporations switching their logos to rainbows to “celebrate”, I’m using this month to highlight even more creators who are part of our LGBTQ+ community.

For those who aren’t as a familiar beyond those colorful logos, Pride Month is an annual celebration that commemorates the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (and other!) communities. It is a month-long celebration that honors the LGBTQ+ community's joys, accomplishments, and contributions to society over our long history. Pride Month traces its roots back to the 1969 Stonewall riots, which started on June 28, 1969. The first Pride marches took place on June 28, 1970, exactly one year after the start of the riots.

I’m super excited to share my first Pride Month Creator Spotlight — Luciano Vecchio! Luciano has quickly become one of my favorite artists after his recent work on Resurrection of Magneto. But he’s been involved in comics long before that, having been featured in Marvel’s Voices: Pride and DC Comics’s DC Pride anthology. He’s also the creator of the webcomic character Sereno.

I’m super grateful for his time and please check out our conversation below:

DERBY COMICS: Happy Pride! What does Pride mean to you & how do you plan to celebrate this year?

VECCHIO: Happy Pride! It means a lot of things, mostly celebration of who we are and a reminder of our collective history of fight and conquest of our rights.

In the last few years it has become a time to reflect on our role as queer authors and representation of queer characters in comics. I've focused very vocally on the subject since before the Pride anthologies started, and I always have something Pride-related in comics around this time.

As for Pride march, I live in Argentina and we do ours in November when it’s warmer, and it’s usually close to my birthday so I get to celebrate double.

DERBY COMICS: How did you get your start in the comic book industry?

VECCHIO: Since I was a kid I decided I wanted to draw mainstream superhero comics. I started with independent projects for publishers big and small, and worked my way up.  My first work was Drumfish Productions’ Sentinels, a very ambitious series of four original graphic novels where I got to learn by drawing hundreds of pages. My entrance to DC and Marvel was through the kids line and digital first comics, and through a lot of work and effort, eventually it led to the main Marvel Universe where I am the best expression of my artist self. 

DERBY COMICS: Your art has always been awesome, but it seemed to reach new heights in Resurrection of Magneto. In one of my reviews, I even noted you had achieved Omega-level status much like Magneto and Storm themselves! Did you feel like you were operating at a different level? If so, was there anything specific about the series that you feel might have helped you push even further with your art?

VECCHIO: Thank you for noticing. It was a conscious effort to level-up my work. I was starting to feel typecasted as “cute” and “juvenile”, which I like but it’s just a very small part of what I have to offer as an artist. So when the Hellfire Gala and then Magneto came around I made a study of my work and what I needed to adjust to expand my range of stories and assignments. There’s always room for growth, and of course working with icons like Storm and Magneto and collaborating with Al Ewing fueled that process with extra inspiration and energy.

DERBY COMICS: What was it like working on a book that focused on two extremely popular mutants within the queer community?

VECCHIO: It was the most fulfilling creative experience in the field so far. These are characters with decades of history, I see them as archetypes larger than the collective myriad of authors who have written and drawn them, and it's humbling and invigorating to contribute to that tapestry. Al’s writing reflects that as well, and it makes me feel like we’re comics magicians channeling our neo-gods through our individual perspective and digital ink. That pretty much is my approach to drawing mainstream super-heroes in general. 

DERBY COMICS: You’ve also spent some time queer mutants. You not only provided art, but also wrote Bobby Drake’s Iceman miniseries for Marvel Unlimited. Was Bobby a character you had a personal connection with before you took on the series?

VECCHIO: Sina Grace’s Iceman series was super important to me, not only as a reader finding identification with a character and story, but also as an author because it made me decide that was the kind of story I wanted to draw. I didn’t dream back then that I would get to write him too! And through that writing process I realized how much more I had in common with Bobby than I noticed before, and how effortless it was to give voice to him. That story remains one of my proudest works. I’m so happy the first episode got printed in page for the first time in this year’s X-Men: The Wedding Special, and the full story can be read for free at https://www.marvel.com/comics/guides/2405/marvel-s-voices-iceman

DERBY COMICS: Speaking of your multiple talents, congratulations on your creator-owned comic Sereno getting a new English trade! Can you share what the book is about for those who may be unfamiliar and what inspired you to create it?

VECCHIO: Sereno is a magic boy queer superhero with light and empathy powers, protecting the nights of Nueva Teia, a time when a vibrational shift sets monsters and villains loose.

I started it as a webcomic a decade ago, and back then the landscape of queer representation in superheroes was very different to what it is today. I created the superhero I needed as a kid and didn’t exist. A queer lead, but also a narrative alternative to what a male character can do, and how he can act and resolve conflicts.

You can check out the English edition here https://www.cexcomics.com/series/sereno/

DERBY COMICS: If the opportunities presents themselves, are you interested in writing more comic projects? Would you ever trust someone else to illustrate a comic you wrote? [laughs]

VECCHIO: Absolutely. I’m an artist first but I like the challenge and I love writing. It’s not my main activity so I’m not out there pitching projects or actively asking for it, I just don’t know how to do it, but I’m always open to the possibility.

DERBY COMICS: You also have a new one-shot, White Widow: Venomous, and miniseries, Venom War: Venomous, coming out this Summer. How do you prepare yourself when transitioning into a new project that has totally different characters and environments?

VECCHIO: It changes from project to project. My first step is always a deep dive in the character’s publication history, to see what visual notes resonate with me, and how I can relate emotionally to the story. For example, this series focuses on Black Widow in partnership with a Symbiote, so I decided to distance myself a bit from the realistic secret soldier aesthetic of the last few decades and circle back to her 70s revamp, which had a strong connection to Spider-Man, and the super-agent vibe of that era. Reconnecting the pieces of the character’s complex history and presenting it in a new, modern way.

DERBY COMICS: Where can fans look forward to seeing you next?

VECCHIO: I’m traveling less lately, so I’m focusing on local and Latin-America events only for the near future. But I’m always on socials, mostly on Instagram and Twitter. And in your comics, of course :)