IDW and Tom Beland Unleash Chicacabra with Chupacabras, Vejigantes, Fistfights, and Weed!
Steve Barton
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Tom Beland, best known for his multiple Eisner-nominated series True Story, Swear to God, brings his unique storytelling to IDW this June in an all-new graphic novel series entitled Chicacabra.
Chicacabra is a story infused with the humanity for which Beland’s work is so rightly acclaimed, but this time he has written and illustrated an all-new cast of very human characters in a more supernatural setting.
“Tom Beland’s work is the perfect mix of comic book storytelling with expressive art, interesting characters, and a resonant, emotional core,” said Chris Ryall, IDW’s Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief, “and I couldn’t be happier to see him apply those skills in this new way on Chicacabra. Tom’s books have always been the kind of thing you want to hand someone, whether they’re new to comics or a veteran reader who thinks they’ve seen it all. There’s something for everyone in his work, and never more so than with Chicacabra, which pushes into the supernatural while still staying a fundamentally grounded, human tale.”
Synopsis:
You would think being a young woman in high school would come with more than enough drama, but for Isabel Sanchez that is a mere drop in the bucket of her life. On the outside Isabel looks and acts like your average Puerto Rican girl, but after a family tragedy and then a mysterious incident, she finds herself with a monster capable of great brutality living inside her. But is it her friend or foe? Isabel will have to learn to live with a killing machine inside her and navigate high school in this first in a series of planned Chicacabra graphic novels. And heads will roll, to say the least!
Chicacabra will be available in a regular edition and a special version with an alternate cover only offered at the Puerto Rico Comic-Con, May 24-25 at the Puerto Rico Convention Center.
“I think people will relate to Isabel. I think we all have a chupacabra in us in some way. There’s fear, doubt, many things that you hold deep inside of yourself,” said Beland. “This is about two souls working together in a relationship that could be damaging as well as healing. I love making it. To a degree it was as emotional as making TSSTG.”
Chicacabra #1, a 200-page, black & white, $17.99 trade paperback, debuts in June 2014.
I believe we all know what a chupacabra is, but in case you’re unfamiliar with the term “vejigante” (we were), per Wikipedia, it’s a folkloric character in Puerto Rican festival celebrations (mainly seen in Carnival time). In the old days, the vejigante symbolized the Devil in the battle between good and evil, and vejigante masks are usually meant as “fright” masks. Traditional colors of the Vejigantes were black, red, white, and yellow. Today, vejigantes wear brightly colored, ornate masks of all colors and a costume with bat-like wings. The term derives from the word vejiga (bladder) and gigante (giant), due to custom of blowing up and painting cow bladders.
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