6. The world that inspired this universe.

Read from the Magazine Edition

By Fernando Velez

When the comic book project first began, we thought moving to LA to be closer to the industry would help us move the project forward. When we didn’t get approved for the apartment, couch surfing could have easily become a moment defined by depression, anxiety, and uncertainty. Instead, I chose to focus on what was possible.

Rather than seeing the loss of a stable home, a routine, or a sense of permanence, I saw an opportunity to move differently through the world. To see more of it, to experience it in ways I might never have allowed myself to if things had gone according to plan.

I wanted stability, but creation requires experience. It demands seeing life beyond your own environment. That’s when everything began to expand, and we allowed ourselves to let the dominoes continue to fall. So we packed our things — our desktop computer, our projects — and took off to our first stop.

We set our sights first on Paris, a place I had visited before and longed to return to. Starting there gave me familiar ground to prepare for the road ahead. Perhaps it was in Paris that I began to understand why that domino had fallen, because I needed to see the world through the lens of queer lives different from my own.

By the time we arrived in Paris, the pilot had already been printed, and we were expected to fulfill an order from one of the largest distributors, Barnes & Noble. On paper, we were doing something most people never get to do: we had a product and an order from a major bookstore. That was an exciting feeling. Our first book showed us there was a need for representation; it had been accepted by a major distributor where many people dream of seeing their books. Yet something inside me wasn’t proud of that achievement.

Paris shifted how I understood the world I wanted to create in my stories. Walking the streets, sitting in the cafés, watching how people moved through life with ease, intimacy, style, and presence changed something inside me.

One afternoon in the gay neighborhood, drinking beers and watching people pass by, I saw a lesbian couple sitting calmly together. They were simply present. They weren’t performing or hiding. In that moment, I felt like I was watching my characters as simple humans — before trauma, power, or conflict had shaped their lives — just two people sharing space without fear.

That image stayed with me.

I realized my story wasn’t supposed to begin with action and superhero spectacle. It needed to begin with love, vulnerability, and the desire to live a simple, honest life. A hero who hides her identity not out of fear, but because she wants to love, to belong, and to experience normality unaware of her destiny — something readers could recognize in themselves.

I now had to make one of the most critical decisions that would shape the future of the project. While sitting at a café, Waiyen and I were quiet, and I was already leaning toward redoing everything. But that would mean the years to follow would be uncertain — that we would go from being distributors to spending years preparing another book with the accompanying strain that would place on our relationship and our finances. 

After the money had been spent, the time invested, and the acceptance from a major store secured, we had to stop everything — cancel the release, hire more artists, and begin again, knowing it would set us back for years. Yet I made that hard decision: one that wouldn’t make things easier, but that would allow me to explore my creativity more deeply.

Paris showed me that I could give more, and that sometimes I would have to close doors in order to reopen them when I felt ready, even if that meant waiting more than a decade. Maybe the universe hadn’t let us settle because the story itself still needed room to become what it was meant to be — and that could only happen if I saw the world I wanted to represent.

So we kept moving.

In Vienna, we met a man who invited us to smoke weed with him. Everything felt casual at first, until the conversation shifted. He told us his parents had been Nazis who fled Europe to Venezuela after the war. Then he said something that froze me. He said that if the Holocaust hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t exist — and that he was grateful for that.

My body reacted before my mind did. We were in a stranger’s home, in a country we didn’t know, high, listening to someone express gratitude for genocide because it created his life.

I felt my chest tighten. The anxiety became physical. We kept trying to leave politely. He kept asking us to stay.

That night stayed with me. I couldn’t believe how some ideologies don’t disappear — they simply find quieter ways to exist.

It reshaped something inside me. The enemy wasn’t just aliens, but also humans consumed by ideology, convinced their lives were worth more than others. That realization gave weight to the question: Is humanity worth saving?—when humanity includes those born into hate.

Fascism, control, and dehumanization in my stories didn’t come from imagination, but from realities people prefer not to see. These ideologies are still alive, which inspired the idea that the enemy was never truly defeated — that it survived, remained silent, and learned to exploit our differences for its own advancement. People like this shaped the villains’ stories: enemies hiding in plain sight, keeping us divided and fighting one another while they gain control, organize, and prepare for something worse.

After traveling for several years and meeting people from different cultures who helped shape the stories, we arrived in Thailand.

Thailand was the first place where I was able to truly settle after years of traveling — something I couldn’t do in the United States, where the cost of living makes it nearly impossible for creators like me to be present and create instead of constantly worrying about how to survive. Thailand gave me the opportunity to dedicate 13 to 14 hours a day to the project.

During the day, I wrote, organized, planned, and replanned. At night, when it was daytime for the artists, I worked with them until I went to sleep, then woke up to work with them again before their day ended. It was the moment when I could finally let my creativity develop more fully, applying the experiences I had lived through, the obstacles I had faced, and how the vision had grown with each place I visited. All of that was made possible by a country that offered me the warmth of its people and a lifestyle that allowed me to create — without knowing that almost a decade later, before moving to Los Angeles, I would return there to rewrite everything, not just a season, but an entirely new universe.

By then, I had been creating for about eight years. I was securing pitch meetings. I no longer had just a vision — I had the opportunity to bring representation into a major studio. I had to think outside the box. I needed to disconnect and create something little Fernandito would have never thought possible.

The Universe became so expansive that it could no longer fit within the ten episodes I originally planned, so I created two more to complete a twelve-episode first season. I combined all the episodes into a new graphic novel, and finished writing the last two episodes of the season. I was ready to launch a campaign for that one graphic novel — just one book, nothing else. And once again, I stopped.

Everyone around me called me delusional, asked when enough would be enough, told me I was doing too much, and eventually stopped believing in me. But I saw more.I felt there was more in me, and after everything I had lived through, what did it matter to give the last of what I had?

So I decided to rewrite the entire graphic novel, applying the experience I had gained and everything I had learned working with the producer. I couldn’t settle when I knew that, once again, I had more to offer. I dedicated myself to writing more, to expanding the universe where all of us could see ourselves and exist as important — just as that little Fernandito saw himself in his stories.

That decision led me to develop projects I never saw coming, including the novel. The previous episodes’ artwork limited how much I could reshape the story in the graphic novel. Rewriting it the way I would tell it today, or adding more pages, would have taken months and an enormous financial investment. I needed a novel to tell the complete story without limits.

From those two books came the idea for a board game—and from it, four games, music, and more. Today, the book I once decided not to publish has evolved into more than 600 pages of story.

Travel had become a form of transformation.

Travel fueled my imagination. It helped me understand how people within our community live in different parts of the world. It allowed me to build characters with distinct identities shaped by culture, history, and struggle. At the same time, it showed me how deeply connected we remain beyond the borders created to divide us. That realization inspired me to create heroes from different parts of the world whose lives are interconnected. These heroes now come together with their different views, beliefs, and life experiences, united by a single question: