At the New York Public Library, color and ink have become rebellion. ¡Wepa! Puertorriqueños en el mundo de los cómics” isn’t just an art exhibit—it’s a declaration that Puerto Ricans have always drawn their world in panels of humor, heartbreak, and resistance. From the blackouts that darken kitchen tables to the hurricanes that scatter families, from New York’s subways to the island’s mountain roads, these artists are using speech bubbles to speak history back into the record.
A People in Panels
Comics have never just been about superheroes, and “¡Wepa!” makes that truth impossible to ignore. Divided into four themes—“La Isla,” “Nueva York,” “El pasado,” and “Otros mundos”—the show brings together a century of Puerto Rican voices in comics, both on the island and across the diaspora. It’s intimate and defiant, personal and political, drawing a straight line between art and survival.
At the center of the exhibit are independent artists who have turned Puerto Rico’s everyday struggles into graphic testimony. One section shows drawings of Luma Energy’s privatized electrical grid, still blamed for rolling blackouts and sky-high bills since 2021. Political cartoonist José Ortiz Torres turns fury into satire, sketching the company as a fanged monster sucking the island’s lifeblood. “He hammers the stake that pierces the vampires of colonialism,” one curator said, describing Ortiz’s biting humor to EFE. The laughter catches in your throat because it feels too true. Electricity here is not just infrastructure—it’s intimacy. It’s the flicker of a lamp over a child’s homework, the hum of a refrigerator in the dark.
The panels don’t just entertain; they indict. They show how Puerto Ricans, long caricatured as passive victims, have turned art into an argument. Every brushstroke says: we are still here, still drawing, still speaking.
Migration, María, and the Road-Trip Goodbye
If electricity is the exhibit’s current of frustration, migration is its undercurrent of grief. Rosa Colón’s “Goodbye, for now” follows two friends, Mari and Sofía, driving around the island one last time before Sofía leaves for a job in Chicago. It’s a story every Puerto Rican knows by heart—the goodbye that feels too permanent, the leaving that never ends.
Since Hurricane María struck in 2017, hundreds of thousands have left the island in search of work and stability. Colón’s story captures what statistics can’t: the silence of an empty seat, the last sunset before a friend boards a plane, the ache of a joke that won’t be shared again.
The show revisits María often—not as tragedy porn, but as testimony. One piece depicts fallen power lines twisted like vines, with a caption recalling the U.S. president’s visit and the absurd image of paper towels thrown into a desperate crowd. “People are dying and they throw us paper towels,” the text reads, quoting the moment’s cruelty word for word. In another, children play under tarps while neighbors rebuild roofs, proof that solidarity is a survival skill.
The comics remember what the headlines forget: that resilience is not romantic. It’s exhausting. It’s also how Puerto Ricans keep the lights on—literally and metaphorically—when no one else will.
Lineage, Heroes, and a Living Archive
“¡Wepa!” is also an act of remembrance. It traces a creative lineage from the early twentieth century to today’s activist wave. The timeline starts with Alejandro Schomburg Rosa, better known as Alex Schomburg, who left Puerto Rico for New York and went on to paint explosive Captain America covers for Marvel’s predecessor in the 1930s and ’40s. It continues with George Pérez (1954–2022), the legendary artist who helped define 1980s comics for both Marvel and DC and co-created White Tiger, the first Puerto Rican—and Latino—superhero in mainstream comics.
That heritage extends to the present through Edgardo Miranda-Rodríguez, creator of La Borinqueña, a Puerto Rican heroine who doesn’t flee disaster but faces it head-on. “We are using this genre to elevate the people’s consciousness and produce a discourse about what comics don’t usually talk about,” Miranda told EFE. “Most of this activism comes from independent authors.”
Curators Paloma Celis Carbajal and Charles Cuykendall Carter spent two years assembling the show, built around a donation by Puerto Rican librarian Manuel Martínez Nazario, who gifted over 1,400 comics and graphic novels featuring Puerto Rican talent. “It’s a living archive,” Celis Carbajal said to EFE, “a way to keep our cultural memory visible, not stored in silence.”
To walk through the exhibit is to feel the weight of inheritance. Every page on the wall insists that Puerto Rico has always been more than a headline—it’s a visual language of its own.
From Vieques to Children’s Pages: Drawing a Politics of Care
“¡Wepa!” refuses to let art stop at nostalgia. One corner revisits Vieques, the small island used as a U.S. Navy bombing range for six decades until protests forced its closure in 2003. The drawings here are quiet but furious, chronicling what was left behind: illness, unemployment, pollution, and the ache of communities promised recovery that never came. “The damage isn’t just environmental—it’s social, generational, invisible,” a curator told EFE. The exhibit doesn’t end the story of Vieques; it asks what justice looks like after the headlines fade.
The show also turns its gaze toward the next generation. Alice Vanessa Falto Ayala’s “Guailí: El Pequeño Taíno” brings pre-Columbian Puerto Rico to life for children, telling ancestral stories through a playful lens. Martín Gaudier’s “Tato y Kenepo” follows a street cat and a chango bird through city adventures, mischievous and tender. These works suggest that the future of Puerto Rican identity may be written in crayons and speech bubbles. “If children learn their own stories first, they grow up knowing they belong,” Falto Ayala told EFE.
Every artist in “¡Wepa!” is, in some way, drawing a map back home. Together, they turn New York’s grand library into a shared kitchen table, where Puerto Ricans from the island and diaspora compare stories and pass the pen.
What connects the rooms is an insistence that comics are not escape—they are engagement. They document power outages, migration, colonial wounds, and everyday joy. They’re a chorus that refuses to fade.
As one visitor murmured, standing before a sketch of a woman lighting candles during a blackout, “This is us. This is how we keep going.”
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Puerto Rico, drawn in ink and resilience, is still writing itself—panel by panel, page by page, light by flickering light.