HARTFORD, Conn. — Thanks to East Hartford, Conn., resident Cesar Feliciano, Batman, Spider-Man and the Flash have a new comics compatriot: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Feliciano recently finished the artwork for “Female Force: Sonia Sotomayor,” a comic book that will be available in April.
It’s part of the “Female Force” series put out by Bluewater Productions, a Vancouver comic book publisher. The series has featured a diverse group of women, from Michelle Obama to Lady Gaga.
“They’re trying to get more people into comics,” says Feliciano, 44, in his drawing studio on the bottom floor of his house. “When I was a kid, everybody was into them.”
As an artist with no formal training, Feliciano got much of his experience in algebra class, during which he and a friend traded off drawing comics (“I didn’t do so good in algebra,” he says). He went into the Marines after high school. He hadn’t considered artwork as a viable job until a few years ago, when some friends encouraged him to get back into drawing.
He made some connections, which led to work coloring for DC Comics’ “Suicide Squad” series. It was good experience, but Feliciano wanted to be the illustrator. He got his chance shortly after Darren Davis, the publisher of Bluewater Productions, saw samples of his artwork.
Davis asked if Feliciano would like to draw and color the artwork for a comic about Sotomayor. Feliciano says that, as a Hispanic man raised by a single mother, he jumped at the chance.
“I looked at his stuff and thought he was really talented,” says Davis. “And he did likenesses really well. And that was a big thing for us because we’re doing a lot of biography comics, so he was a perfect fit.”
Bluewater, which Davis founded in 2007, specialize in biographies. He says the line between what they do and what people often consider to be “traditional comics” isn’t as distinct as many would think. “There have been nonfiction comics since the 1940s,” he says, “so we’re just the next generation.”
And as the core audience for comics has dwindled considerably since the 1980s, Davis says he thinks the key to comics survival is finding new audiences.
“There’s no readers; kids are playing video games,” he says. “We try to bring new readers to comics books.”
The illustrated Sotomayor doesn’t fly or shoot lasers out of her eyes, but because it’s a comic book, Feliciano can take certain liberties that would be out of place in a straight biography. For instance, it’s unlikely that Sotomayer was surrounded by the cheering cast members of “Seinfeld” when she ruled against an unauthorized trivia game based on the show, but Feliciano makes it happen in the comic.
“It’s fun. Comics are supposed to be fun,” says Feliciano, who is married, with five children. “It kind of makes politics cool to some people.”
Though he’s making more inroads in the comics world, Feliciano still works at his day job as a customer-service manager at Lowe’s home-improvement store in Newington. He said his next comics project might be a biography of soccer star David Beckham.
Unlike the superheroes he’s used to drawing, there’s a certain amount of pressure when you’re drawing a real person, Feliciano says. While drawing Sotomayer, he occasionally wondered if she would see the comic and what she would think of it.
“I’m hoping someday to meet her,” he said, “so I can give her a signed copy.”
