Dark Shifty Eyes, Trouble Making, and a Villainous Swagger… All in Our Hero?

Author Robert Renteria has dark shifty eyes, black hair and dark features. He’s a little bit cool and quiet, and often wears a black suit. He grew up in poverty on the East side of LA and was involved in gangs, drugs, and violence throughout his adolescence. This may sound like the ingredients needed to create the perfect comic book villian. But actually, you’d be surprised.

In Robert’s latest endeavor, collaborating with Round Table Companies and SmarterComics to create “Mí Barrio,” a comic book version of his sought-after memoir “From the Barrio to the Board Room,” one of the most interesting challenges has been transforming Robert’s real life personality and persona—which spans about 50 years and goes from tough street kid to military man to successful business owner to inspiring author—into a comic book character.

Since Robert has developed a dedicated following for his mission to get kids off the streets and help them be successful in life, we continually search for the balance between what is enough to make his character recognizable as Robert yet still have the element of a “good guy” comic book character. Some of Robert’s visual features in an illustrated character equates with the villain of the story. Yet it tends to go back and forth throughout the book. For instance, Robert was a troubled youth so a little villain in him when he was young is OK. But at the end of the story he is the hero, so we must find a way, through character design elements, how to portray Robert as that hero but still stay true to his human likeness. It’s a work in progress, for sure, and working on “Mí Barrio” has been much different than other comic book work we’ve done.

Stay tuned as Robert’s comic book character evolves; Below are some of the initial design work we have created for Robert’s character.