Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to be blasted with gamma rays or get bitten by a radioactive spider to become a superhero. In the upcoming comic book Home from Image Comics, creators Julio Anta and Anna Wieszczyk want readers to know that anyone can become a hero and that origin stories don’t have to only take place in an underground laboratory.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Home is a five-part comic series about a young Guatemalan boy who is separated from his mother at the U.S. / Mexico border. The trauma he faces when he loses his mother is what becomes the catalyst for him to discover that he possesses superhero abilities.
“As the son and grandson of Cuban and Colombian immigrants, and now a parent myself, the news of the government’s family separation policy both broke my heart, and filled me with anger,” Anta told The Hollywood Reporter. “Home is an attempt to channel those complicated feelings about what it means to be an American into a story about empowered Latinx characters dealing with the cruelty of our modern immigration laws.”
In April 2018, the Trump administration adopted a “zero-tolerance” policy to deter illegal immigration by separating children from their families once they reached the U.S. It was reported that more than 1,100 migrant families were separated because of this. According to a court filing in December, there are still 628 migrant children who have yet to be reunited with their parents.
In some of the preview images released by Image Comics, the young boy and his mother are seen starting their journey from Guatemala City during a time when the U.S. administration has “put in place a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entries on our southwest border.”
Words that sound like they could’ve come straight from Donald Trump and his administration provide context through some of the pages of the comic book (“The scourge of illegal migration ends today”). We see a mother and son sleeping outdoors with other migrants, climbing into the back a delivery truck and riding atop a train bound for the U.S.
“We’re finally here!” the mother tells her son when they make it to the border. “We’re just going to answer some questions, spend a few nights with the police officers and then your aunt will pick us up before you know it.”
As much as they wanted, the Trump administration didn’t break the immigrants’ spirit. All they did was create superheroes who will always fight for a better tomorrow.
