Creativity Quote by Gilbert Hernandez

There is a quiet rebellion packed into Hernandez's offhand tone: not a manifesto, just a shrug that rewires what comics are allowed to be. "Grew out of the superhero comics" isn't a diss so much as a coming-of-age plot twist. Superheroes represent the dominant genre grammar of American comics - power fantasies, clean arcs, moral clarity. Growing out of them signals a hunger for messier stakes: rent, relationships, boredom, shame, lust, neighborhood politics. The key is that the affection remains: "but we still liked comics". Hernandez refuses the usual adolescent move of abandoning the medium to be taken seriously. Instead he insists comics can mature without turning into something else.

The subtext sits in "our own experiences" and "our own amusement". This is a DIY ethic that predates the algorithmic pressure to build a brand. They weren't chasing legitimacy from publishers or critics; they were chasing the feeling that made them love comics in the first place, now recalibrated for their lives. That self-directed pleasure is an aesthetic strategy: if the primary audience is you and your friends, you're freer to draw people who don't look like heroes, to let scenes linger, to mix melodrama with mundanity, to treat culture and class as texture instead of themes.

Contextually, it echoes the alternative-comics shift of the late 70s and 80s, when creators like the Hernandez brothers expanded the medium's subject matter without abandoning its vernacular energy. The line stakes a claim: comics don't need capes to be epic; lived experience is already serialized.