By Zack Quaintance — I recently wrote an advanced review of Home #1, a new series from Image Comics that uses the real life atrocities around family separation at the U.S. border for a story about a super-powered youth. It’s a poignant and heavily-researched comic that uses the news to turn a mirror on all of our complicity in what' has happened. And today, I had a chance to send some questions to the book’s writer, Julio Anta.

You can check out our conversation below, ahead of the first issue’s release on April 14…

Interview: Julio Anta talks HOME #1

ZACK QUAINTANCE: As someone who follows immigration news closely and has actually lived in McAllen, Texas, where part of the story occurs...I was struck by how realistic this story felt. What was your research process like for this book?

JULIO ANTA: I take that as an immense compliment, thanks Zack!

The research process was pretty extensive. I started researching this book before I even knew I was writing it, to be honest. As soon as news broke about family separation I was heartbroken and angry, and the only way I knew how to deal with that was to learn as much as possible about what was going on. That meant reading every article I could find, watching hundreds of videos and listening to interviews with family members.

When I eventually decided to write this book I dove even deeper. By then there was much more reporting and information going around, so I used that to make this book as real and authentic as possible. I spent a lot of time on Google Maps street view looking around the key areas the book was taking place in, specifically around the international bridge, to make sure I was able to fill my scripts with reference images for Anna [Wieszczyk].

Another thing some people may not realize is that everything you see in HOME #1 is real — with the exception of the superpowers of course. When we see a father coerced into letting his son go for a medical check-up when in fact his son is being taken from him, or when a baby is ripped from her mothers breast, those are instances that have been documented by reporters to have happened in these facilities.

ZACK: How much — if at all — did you think about what the readers may or may not know about the real places and events included in Home?

JULIO: I don’t think you need to know anything about family separation to read and understand HOME, but I did write the book with the assumption that most readers would likely be familiar with the basics of the “zero tolerance” policy.

I used those first three pages to explain the political context with sections of a Jeff Sessions speech, but as you know from reading it, I don’t spend much time on the politics of the policy. With the exception of his portrait on the wall of the immigration facility, Trump doesn’t appear in the book. The politics and politicians behind the policy were not the point, the people suffering from it were my focal point.

ZACK: I don’t want you to spoil anything, but this is in the preview text so I feel like it’s fair game...our hero manifests superpowers, literally becoming empowered. What made it so important for that to happen in this book?

JULIO: To build on what I was saying earlier, the point of this book is the people affected by the cruelty of family separation. With that said, I also wanted to empower Juan and give him agency in a way that the children in these facilities often aren’t. Superpowers were a way for me to just how out of control Juan’s life is, yet how strong he is to be able to survive this.

And to be quite frank, I wanted this to be a story that could appeal to readers in the direct market who are rarely exposed to Latinx characters.

I figured I could rope them in with some super powers, and then say what I want to say with these characters.

ZACK: I always wonder this about books that include events that are so recent, but was it difficult at all to tell this story as the news cycle kept churning so quickly during its making?

JULIO: It was difficult in the sense that as time went on, the amount of material available to me to research was more than I had time to dive into. Every new interview or article led me down another rabbit hole.

ZACK: Finally, I found this story to be incredibly heartrending. How was it for you as a creator working with this material? Was it difficult at all?

JULIO: It was extremely difficult to write this book. It’s hard to describe just how difficult it was… There were many points in the process where I had to step away from my research and writing because I couldn’t keep typing or listening to an interview through the tears.

This is a book fueled by incredible anger and deep sadness. My hope is that it translated that way onto the page.

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.