Nhora Lucía Serrano, director of academic technology, teaching, and research services, guest edited a special issue of INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. Volume 9, Issue 3 (Fall 2025), Inked Latinidades is now live on Project Muse and available open access.
This special issue brings together five peer-reviewed essays by Latinx/e scholars and a “From the Archives” section that examines the visual, cultural, and ideological legacies of Latinx/e comics. Together, these contributions show that Latinx/e comics have long been central to American visual culture, offering powerful modes of critique, resistance, and self-definition through satire, revisionist histories, speculative narratives, and everyday storytelling.
In her introduction, Serrano traces a visual and ideological lineage from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Pan-American imagery to contemporary Latinx/e comics, examining how early representations reinforced U.S. hemispheric dominance and how Latinx/e artists have since challenged these frameworks through visual resistance, community-based storytelling, and the development of new narrative languages.
In addition to guest editing the issue, Serrano contributes a peer-reviewed essay on Gus Arriola’s Gordo, exploring how Mexican cerámica informed the strip’s bilingual visual modernism and positioning Gordo as a vital cultural artifact that transmitted Latinx/e identity within mid-twentieth-century American mass media.
Posted January 8, 2026
