In 1998, North Texas writer-journalist Hector Cantu was working at The Dallas Morning News (as the production director of Quick) when he and Florida artist Carlos Castellanos developed their comic strip, Baldo, one of the first Latino-themed comics to be syndicated in daily, English-language newspapers (certainly the first for Universal Press, the largest independent press syndicate in the world). Today, Cantu is the editorial director for Heritage Auction Galleries, Castellanos is a commercial artist and the teenage Baldo and his family appear in some 200 newspapers nationwide.

We talk to Cantu about how he and Castellanos managed to break into the extremely tight and long-held space of the comics page, whatever happened to Baldo’s mom, how do the creators handle Hispanic-American political issues and what happened when Baldo went Hollywood?