Ivan Velez

Ivan Velez Jr. (born 1961) is an openly gay Latino American cartoonist, writer, museum educator, and teaching artist, known for creating the groundbreaking comic book series Tales of the Closet, and for his work with the DC Comics imprint Milestone Media, and with Marvel Comics. Velez created one of the first narratives about queer youth in his series Tales of the Closet (1987-1993). The author notes that he struggled watching people in the gay community die from a lack of education and communication about AIDS. So, he created a comic to educate both straight and queer teens. This brought him to Milestone Media in the early 1990s, where he expanded Latino representation to include queer, straight, and multicultural Latino characters in Milestone Media's series Blood Syndicate. Notably, Velez's characters were known for their diversity in ethnicity, race, gender identity and sexual orientation. Following the cancellation of the Milestone line, Velez worked as a freelance writer for DC's other imprints and for Marvel Comic, where he was the company's second Latino writer, after George Pérez. In working for Marvel and DC, Velez has been one of the few Puerto Rican writers to work for the Big Two in American comics publishing. Velez illustrated works that commented on his experience as gay, Latino man in the United States. His work has appeared in Gay Comix, for which he illustrated one cover, Details, HX Magazine,[4] and the anthology Qu33r. Velez edited graphic novels for Dutton Books (Dead High Yearbook), earning an award from the American Library Association. He is a serial grant winner notable for such awards as the Creative Capital Visual Arts grant, the SuCasa fellowship grant, the Xeric grant as well as several via the Bronx Council of The Arts. In an interview with CBR.com, Velez stated that the style in which he rendered the series differed from his previous work by depicting various peoples and time periods of American history with a greater sense of realism.