AJ Mendez and Aimee Garcia have teamed up to release their first independent comic through their production company, Scrappy Heart Productions. The remarkable storytelling duo previously worked on Dungeons & Dragons: At the Spine of the World and a comic based on Netflix’s hit show GLOW. Now they’re stepping into the world of horror with a unique story that derives from their real life experiences at Latinas. Day of the Dead Girl follows Coroner Sam Castillo who teams up with her spiritual mother to uncover why a coven’s Brujas [witches] have begun disappearing.
The synopsis reads,”death is never the end of the story. Coroner Sam Castillo will learn this the hard way, when a supernatural serial killer targets her hometown just as she moves back. A skeptical woman of science, Sam butts heads with her spiritual mother Ana, a leader of a witch coven specializing in Brujeria [a type of witchcraft]. But when the coven’s Brujas start turning up murdered, Sam and Ana must work together to find the killer and save their town’s Day of the Dead festival from turning into an occult bloodbath. As if sharing a bathroom with her mom wasn’t hard enough.”
ComicBook caught up with Mendez and Garcia to discuss the new comic series which hits shelves on October 9th. They shared their insight into creating the story, pulling from their own experiences, their research and the storybook art that lines the pages.
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What Inspired Day of the Dead Girl
While the duo have worked on many projects together including on-screen with Netflix’s Blade of the 47 Ronin, this is the first time they’re independently producing a comic through their company. The two shared what inspired the project as well as why exactly Day of the Dead Girl was the perfect launching point into, hopefully, more stories down the line.
Aimee: It checks so many boxes for us. I mean, we’re obviously obsessed with death for very different reasons. You know, I personally flatlined when I was four years old. Or three weeks, the little girl next to me didn’t make it. So I’ve literally stared death in the face and came back.
AJ: I’m just f–ked up. I’m a horror fan. I begrudgingly watch a lot of true crime and it’s addicting. It’s a really interesting world to see that it’s this one thing that’s the equalizer for everybody. A death is democratic and the beautiful thing about Aimee’s Mexican culture is this kind of celebration of life instead of mourning death. So we really wanted to balance those scales.
Aimee: Exactly. AJ specifically loves horror, and we have this kind of dark, macabre kind of sense of humor that checks witches, Brujas, supernatural, serial killer, magic and death so we thought why not create something that blends all those things together because we’re really fans of those all those genres.
Pulling Inspiration From Their Ancestry and Backgrounds
Latin culture is still so unexplored in pop culture, which is exactly why Mendez and Garcia started their production company. They hadn’t seen little girls or women that looked like them on pages of comics or books, so they decided to take initiative and do it themselves. Day of the Dead Girl really focuses on heritage especially when it comes to the supernatural elements, as the occult has many roots and ties to Latin culture. Because of this, it allowed both of them to come explore their own backgrounds, including Mendez who pulls from Brujas in her own family.
AJ: I mean, I’m so proud there’s so many Bruja branches in my family tree. It’s something that is, for a very long time, it becomes this thing where they call it the broom closet, right? Where you’re hiding sort of the practice of it and so many people in my family have. So as we became a production company to tell these stories, that’s something that’s so rich that I’ve really dived into almost just to study it with this agnostic view and not seeing it as good or evil or just really trying to have an open mind about it.
Through studying it, I really fell in love with it. I have an entire shelf in my office that’s all just like occult books and just connecting to how the basis of innocent healing and in connecting to worlds that are not just our own and spirits that are not just our own. We’re not alone in this world is the thought behind it. You can connect to certain divine energy to get some shit done. You can’t go dark with it. And I think that that’s fun, but it’s a choice. There’s always a balance paid for whatever you are communicating with or taking from there. It will find a way to balance those scales. So that’s always been this kind of runner and stuff that we’re interested in, stories we’re interested in telling. It’s kind of a Mulder and Scully situation for this mother and daughter character.”
Aimee: We also draw from our own authentic backgrounds, candles and praying to candles; having angels come through at 11:11. That was a really big [thing] 11:11 was when the angels could be the most heard. And anytime we lost a loved one, they would communicate by being a hummingbird or a butterfly. Obviously Dia de los Muertos is part of our Mexican heritage so we would celebrate their favorite food and their favorite cerveza or beer and put pictures of them of their happiest memories.
So for us as Latinas, we grew up up with candles and praying to them and believing in spirits and not being scared of ghosts and talking to ghosts firmly if you have to wake up early in the morning. And they’re pulling some shenanigans at 2.30 a.m.. So we really grew up with families that, whether they themselves call themselves good witches or whether they lit candles, whether they communicated with the other side, it was so commonplace for us that it was surprising when we go outside of that culture.
And it’s not the same for everyone. So we thought, ‘oh, how fun that we could bring our own personal anecdotes to this and our own personal family experiences and share our beautiful Latina experience with the world?’ Maybe even show them something that they didn’t know before in a way that Coco did for so many. I mean, how beautiful that a kids movie is now sparking the opener of a James Bond movie?”
Storybook-Like Art in Day of the Dead Girl
From the covers alone, it’s clear that there was a great care taken in the visual aspect of the comic series. They almost look as though they were plucked out of a film set or still, thanks to Derbla Kelly who blended the art of Belén Culebras and Yasmin Flores Montanez into an array of colorful magic. When asked how much input they had in the art on the pages or if the team had free range, both Mendez and Aimee praised the artists for how they were able to bring their ideas to the page.
AJ: I just want to quickly shout out Derbla Kelly who is our colorist. We were just talking about this yesterday. We like to say we’re very hands-on with involved — we’re control freaks. However, the magic of this medium is that there’s so many people who are so much better and you at bringing something to life. We can write. We can’t draw. We can’t color. And so you have to really trust these artists to be amazing and connect with your vision and bring something special to the table.
Belén [Culebras] was such a gift from heaven. I feel like she went to medical school to figure out how to draw these autopsies. She draws the inside of people’s bodies and organs and these crazy murder scenes. There’s a serial killer in our story and she makes it beautiful and haunting. So we definitely threw a lot of our vision and we were so specific about — we knew exactly what we wanted, but then she would take s–t to the next level and blew us away.”
Aimee: Yeah, she’s incredible. She’s from Spain. So it was nice that Spanish is her language as well. We sprinkled in Spanish. Which we thought, ‘oh, how cool that this family’s naturally bilingual and bicultural without leading with it.’ It’s just peppered in throughout very organically. Belen is so in tune with not only the true crime aspect of the science, but the Katrina aspect of the sugar skulls in Day of the Dead. The relatable characters where you see yourselves in these characters. The fantastical, because it is supernatural and there are supernatural elements. The ghosts, I mean, she somehow checked all of these boxes. Like AJ said, [she] was a total godsend and we cannot wait because comics is such a visual medium, it’s such an artist’s medium. You know, a picture’s worth a thousand words and she will blow your mind with these images that just pop off the pages.”
Day of the Dead Girl from Magma Comix and Scrappy Heart Productions goes on sale October 9th. It is currently available for pre-order. The additional variant cover pictured above is from Puerto Rican artist Yasmin Flores Montanez (R.L Stine’s Secrets of the Swamp) and will be available for purchase through various comic shops, including the Magma website.
