The Immigration Officer
Luis Wong and HermanosMagia Studios (Mateo and Gabriel Alayza) deliver a compelling story in our latest volume of Cosmic Journeys. Available Now!
Check out the creators at the link below.
How long have you been creating comics?
LUIS WONG: I took the intro class at Comics Experience in 2020 and since then I’ve been writing scripts. The Immigration Officer will be my first published comic and I’m very excited about it.
MATEO ALAYZA: I have been running a studio alongside my brother and from time to time, we have been working on different projects related to comics and other visual media. This is going to be our first comics project published outside Latin America.
Inspiration for the story? How long did you have the idea?
LW: One of the inspirations was the bureaucrats' scenes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: lazy and slow bureaucrats doing the same job over and over again, creating angst and despair. The second one was my own personal experience with bureaucracy, both as a user but also as an administrative assistant when I was an intern back at university. There’s always this feeling that some people just don’t care and want to keep things as they are.
MA: In my case, the inspiration also comes from a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
How did you find your collaborators? What art style did you want to go for?
LW: I’ve been working with both Mateo and Gabriel for a while. As we’ve collaborated on several games projects, especially on Arrog, which won several awards at festivals around the World, I reached out to them as soon as I decided I wanted to make this story. They immediately said yes and we started this collaboration. We are already working on our second short story together.
MA: We always wanted to make a collaboration with Luis, because many times we dream about projects with a more independent identity, but in the media of videogames is very challenging to produce them, so comics are a great platform to explore and develop different types of stories and narrative identities. We felt that the sole of the drawings should break the typical cleanness that is used in a story about bureaucracy, especially in this case concerning someone who is trying to do things with the best possible outcome to his space office.
Did anything about your story change during the process?
MA: haha, yes that's the beauty of it, some changes came later so we had to change entire pages. This is always something interesting because drawing different characters and places of the world expands the Imaginarium of the comic. You realize that this makes you stop drawing for a story and more for a living world.
LW: I had great editing feedback from both Gabbie and James so I decided to change some scenes to add more stakes in the story. The main one being the competition between Troy and Osswald to take on the boss role.
How many stories have you gotten published in other anthologies or as stand-alone comics?
LW: This is my first published comic ever, so I’m really excited!
MA: With our studio, we have published at least ten stories and more than twenty children's books.
Who are your influences?
LW: I love the work from Ed Brubaker and James Tynion IV and they are my main references. My fantasy collaboration team would be to work with Juanjo Guarnido (the artist of Blacksad) or with Álvaro Martínez Bueno (the artist of The Nice House on the Lake).
MA: A very weird mixture of Paul Pope, and Brinsdone Smith. But these are references for this project because we always change the style of what we do depending on what we are facing.
See you across the Cosmos!
