‘Baldo’ Cartoonist Draws Latino Comic to Lake Worth

About 11 years ago, Carlos Castellanos and Hector Cantu pitched a comic strip about an American Latino family to a handful of national syndicates. For two years, they inked character mock-ups, hashed out future plotlines, storyboards and rough sketches. They even whipped together a proposal for an animated television series, an idea far down the pipeline which they would eventually option to Hollywood studios.

Castellanos and Cantu called it “Baldo,” its namesake character a slacker teenager working as a part-time car parts dealer while living with his headstrong father Papi, brainy sister Gracie and shrewd aunt, Tia Carmen. By 2000, the duo had scored national print syndication in dozens of newspapers and, staggeringly, those Hollywood studios soon began approaching the “Baldo” creators.

So the pair hopped planes to Los Angeles one morning in 2001 and Castellanos, greeting his longtime partner, felt a surge of excitement twinged with an uncomfortable pit of fear. It wasn’t about the Hollywood pitch.

“It was the first time we had ever met,” Castellanos said with a chuckle during an interview last week at Palm Beach State College’s Dario Gallery. “What if we really hated each other? Like, comic strip dead, immediately? People found that odd, us never meeting until then. I didn’t. I did a lot of agency work freelancing as a commercial artist, and a lot of my clients were out-of-state.”

It was true: Before their West Coast rendezvous, Castellanos and Cantu never once collaborated in-studio, entrusting in each other the entire success of a strip to a grainy voice over the telephone. Thankfully, he said, they didn’t hate each other.

“Baldo” turned 11 this year, a half-decade younger than its titular character, and, to celebrate, Palm Beach State is hosting “Baldo Comics by Carlos Castellanos” through Oct. 14 at its Lake Worth Campus. On a recent Friday, the muscular 50-year-old, who illustrates daily “Baldo” comics from his home studio in West Palm Beach, today sports a blue shirt and Levis. Strolling the gallery, he passes some 40-odd framed color and black-and-white strips, storyboards and cardboard cut-outs of the Baldo clan – an oeuvre of cartoons that, to him, are less nostalgia tour than an ink-stained statement about growing up Latino.

“I take these cardboard cutouts everywhere I go. Classrooms, in workshops. My bodyguards,” he joked, wrapping his arm around the two-dimensional Baldo, whom he said is modeled after his older brother, Alex. “When we were growing up, we were raised by our moms in a single-family household, so we wanted to explore the single-parent experience. “In the media, you always see minority Latino families headed by the mother while the father is absent. So in Baldo’s world, we made a headstrong father and never developed the mother character.”

“Baldo” entered the picture in 1997 after Cantu, a Hispanic business magazine editor, hired Castellanos for commercial illustration work. “We knew up front it would be a family strip centered around a teenager,” Castellanos said, pointing to a poster-sized panel listing the origins of “Baldo” characters. (Gracie was originally planned to be Baldo’s older, voluptuous teen sister, for example.) “[Hector] called me up one day and was like, ‘Do you want to do a comic strip?’ I was like, ‘Sure, but can you write one?’?” he added. “It’s coming up with gag jokes 365 days of the year.”

Castellanos, a Cuba-born artist who immigrated to the United States at 8 months old said “Baldo” debuted to American comic strip-readers in 2000, mere months after the 2000 Census revealed a flood of new Hispanic households, consumers who represented a built-in demographic for Castellanos and Cantu. “Baldo” earned syndication easily.

“It came at the right place at the right time, marketed to a mass audience. It wasn’t a Latino strip about a Latino family, it was about a family who happened to be Latino,” said Castellanos, a father of three who also runs CartooningPro.com, a website that aids growing artists with instructional videos. “These characters are a compilation of almost everyone we know. I have an aunt that’s really crazy like Tia Carmen.”

“Baldo,” which is now syndicated in 250 national newspapers, runs three-framed, stereotype-breaking strips ranging from Latino food to language. A gallery wall dedicated to black-and-white dailies tackles subject matter such as a droll panel series on Latino gang stereotypes – a two-week series involving a John Wayne-esque hall monitor busting Baldo for perceived violent activities. Nearby, a Hispanic Heritage Month-themed strip puns, as Baldo leads a Caucasian girl to his family’s backyard fiesta, that “every day is Hispanic Heritage Month.”

Along the opposite wall are a dozen color Sunday-edition “Baldos,” each containing quips on complicated, apolitical issues, such as Papi developing type 2 diabetes, a disease shared by Castellanos’ mother and father. In one Sunday panel, Baldo is faced with the head-scratching choice of picking “English” or “Spanish” before withdrawing cash at the ATM machine, a strip that Castellanos said stresses Baldo’s constant tightrope act of navigating two cultures at once.

“If you were a fly on the wall of my house, you would see my world is ‘Baldo’,” Castellanos said. “Hector has a teenage son, too. Everything that Baldo does is what me and Hector’s kid does. For the last couple of years, the comics have been drawn from our teenage sons’ experiences. All this new stuff has given us so much material.”

“Baldo Comics by Carlos Castellanos” runs through Oct. 14 at the Dario Gallery at Palm Beach State College, 4200 S. Congress Ave., Lake Worth. Admission is free. Call 561-868-3909., or visit