Ep 4: 'Love & Rockets' with David Galvez

In today's episode, Colin discusses the Hernandez Brothers’ groundbreaking comic book series, "Love & Rockets" with his dear friend, chosen family, and someone whose wedding he was honored to officiate (despite being given insufficient information as to what it should entail), veteran Educator, student advocate, dark humor/dog-lover, and jack-of-all-trades, Mr. David Galvez. 

David Galvez is the proud son of Mexican immigrants and spent most of his childhood growing up in the eastern LA County communities of El Monte and Baldwin Park in the San Gabriel Valley. He credits his early love of independent comics, science fiction, and punk music as being the lifelines that got him through the dogma and propaganda of conformity and standardized testing experienced during his early educational journey. After dropping out and proudly attaining his GED, David’s next steps led him to stops across California, Arizona and Texas, where he held a wide array of jobs, including photographing karate students, stripping down cars, and working as a cook, waiter, and bartender at numerous two-star restaurants and dive-bars. His search for a decent dental care plan led him back to the classroom where he eventually received his BA in English from UC Berkeley and a M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology from UT Austin. He’s since carved out a career as an educator for over 15 years, where he’s served as a substitute teacher, non-profit educator, counselor, professor and higher education administrator at The University of Texas, UC San Diego and Ventura College. He currently serves as the Director of Equity at the College of San Mateo where he continues to center, support and lend compassion, humor and love towards a student’s academic and career journey and search for intellectual freedom. David currently lives in Pacifica, California with his partner and wife, Marley, and their Fur Baby, Fela Cutie.

"Love and Rockets" (often abbreviated L&R) is a comic book series by the Hernandez brothers: Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario. It was one of the first comic books in the alternative comics movement of the 1980s. In 1982, Fantagraphics Books published the first issue of Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers (Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario), and the series has since gone on to become the publisher’s flagship title, a monumental work of graphic fiction. Collected under the umbrella of L&R, the series is comprised of two separate ongoing stories: Gilbert chronicles the colorful inhabitants of the fictional Latin American town of Palomar, while Jaime follows Latinx friends and sometime lovers Maggie and Hopey and their circle of friends in the punk scene of the fictional Californian town Hoppers. Over the course of L&R’s multi-decade run, its characters have aged in real time, lending these stories a depth and weight that few literary works achieve. The Hernandez brothers continue to release new issues of "Love and Rockets."

The Paper Plane is a podcast created and hosted by Colin Masashi Ehara, where he interviews people he is blessed and honored to share community with, and asks them about a book(s) that have had a transformational impact on their lives. In a society where literacy rates are steadily declining and a growing number of podcasts hosted by cishet men, un/consciously champion expressions of masculinity that come at the expense of women, femmes, and LGBTQIA2S+ (especially BIPOC) folx, this space aims to operate as a counter-narrative.

The Paper Plane is a space that intends to highlight the dire importance of relationships, community, dialogue, perpetual learning, honest expression as art, art as honest expression, and freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom. It speaks to planes of existence attached to the act of reading, but also as a metaphor for the “flights” we take as we sit in what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “a one way interface” as readers, and how these “journeys” shape us...