It was an explosion set off by shortages, ingenuity, comics, the TV, and the movies. During the late 80’s and early 90’s, a new style started brewing among comic artists in Puerto Rico.

It is a style that is defined by the adversities of the times as much as the artistic creations that set it apart. The artists that initiated this movement grew up watching American cartoons as well as detective and sci-fi television shows from the late fifties, sixties and seventies.

Probably as influential as American comics, the new style was graphically refined by anime which became very popular in the island in the 1970’s long before it did in the U.S.

Puerto Rican artists began publishing their own comics around 1985. Initially, most of these artists met casually every week at David’s Comic Clan, a comic book store in Río Piedras (San Juan) where many of their personal projects were conceived.

Owned by David Velázquez, the store sponsored the island’s first comic convention at this time. It was the beginning of a movement, but surely no one suspected its historical significance.

Early in the nineties, most comics were printed in black and white with a color cover, a standard for independent comic books back then, but the colors used for the covers were in no way traditional or standard.

In Puerto Rico, the small print shops, which were affordable to the artists, couldn't handle full (four) color process and relied on small run printing presses to do the job. The result was a cover printed using multiple "spot" colors, sometimes as many as six, to mimic the look and feel of a traditional full color image.

These spot colors were richer in gamut than the traditional "cmyk" process colors, resulting in a strong, graphic look. This handicap brought the aesthetic of the art closer to the island's rich silkscreen/print tradition of the 1950's, distancing it from the refined computer generated look prevalent in American comics of the era.

Known as "Bomba Visión" or Bombavision, it is unclear if “bomba” (bomb in Spanish) alludes to the explosive nature of its artistic contents or if it’s a reference to the afrocaribbean musical genre native to Puerto Rico which

bears the same name.

Other versions include Bomba Fission, Bomba Fusion and, the derogatory form Bomba bicho which substitutes vision for the local slang term for penis.

Although the presence of superheroes is prominent, many bomba stories explore the figure of the anti-hero generally through fantasy, science fiction, suspense, terror and comedy.

The style favors short stories that range from the verbose to the onomatopoeic (cuá style), often incorporating Spanish words or Spanglish phrases adding local cultural references to the stories.

In some cases, Puerto Rican folklore plays a strong role in the stories. Urban legends and popular characters from the island are often depicted, usually placed in native landscapes and city scenes that are familiar to the artists and their local readers.

Bombavision comics were predominantly published in black and white, but there are many titles that are published in full color, particularly a tropical palette of basic but bright colors. Bombavision is highly graphic, in other words, typically based on two-dimensional designs produced by lines, strokes, shadows, and type.

Also, bombavision comics have been known to come in a wide variety of unusual formats (8.5”x 5.5”, 8”x 8”, 7” x 10”, etc.).

While a mature crop of artists was doing the nasty, a second invasion of Japanese animation hit Puerto Rican shores in the late 80's via local television stations with ties to Latin American networks and distributors with strong connections to the Japanese market.

This new influence, spiked by a massive wave of new comic book shops sprouting throughout the island, revived interest in veteran artists and gave birth to a whole new breed of artists.

Approaching the turn of the century, the Internet became a new venue for comic publishers to post and distribute their titles.

Also, the emergence of new digital printing shops with affordable rates propelled the local comic scene to the stratosphere.