News Release

Baldo Celebrates Five Years in Syndication

Kansas City, Mo  (04/20/2005)  "Baldo," the first nationally syndicated comic strip featuring a Latino family living in the United States, is celebrating its fifth year of publication this month. Baldo is seen in more than 200 newspapers around the nation, including The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News.

The main character of the daily strip is Baldo Bermudez, a typical 15-year-old boy who happens to be Latino. Like other teenage boys, he dreams about the prettiest girl in school, watches soccer and is building a low-rider, one part at a time. He is joined by his caring father, his 8-year-old sister, Gracie, and his aunt (Tia) Carmen. Gracie is more interested in saving the Earth than playing with Barbie dolls. Tía Carmen helps her niece and nephew with Old World ways and magical remedies.

Baldo is written by Hector Cantú, an editor at Quick, the Dallas Morning News tabloid for younger readers, and drawn by Carlos Castellanos an illustrator living in West Palm Beach. Cantú created his first newspaper cartoon when he was 12 for a small town paper owned by his brother. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and spent six years with Hispanic Business magazine.

Shortly before arriving at the Dallas Morning News in 1998, Cantú felt the time was right to create a comic strip based on a Latino family. He contacted Carlos Castellanos, who began illustrating the comic strip. The two began to create the Bermudez family through extensive phone conversations. Cantú and Castellanos drew from their common experiences to inspire the stories and characters in Baldo. They signed with Universal Press Syndicate in 1999.

Baldo stars a Latino family but it is meant to appeal to Latinos and non-Latinos. “We didn’t want Baldo to be a ‘Latino strip.’ We wanted to create a strip that was humorous and entertaining – and it just happened to have a Latino family as the focus,” says Castellanos.

During the past five years, Cantú and Castellanos have used Baldo’s popularity to support several causes. In 2004, Baldo teamed up with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project to encourage voter registration for the November presidential election. On July 2, 2004, Cantú and Castellanos drew attention to National Literacy Day with a special cartoon. Baldo has also contributed billboard art for a public awareness campaign to encourage the Dallas-Fort Worth Latino community to walk for health and the economy.

Baldo’s success led to the publication of "The Lower You Ride, The Cooler You Are: A Baldo Collection" in summer 2001. The book is a collection of Baldo’s first year of adventures. The second Baldo book, "Night of the Bilingual Telemarketers" was released in September 2002.

Creator(s): Hector Cantu and Carlos Castellanos

Contact(s): Kathie Kerr (kkerr@amuniversal.com or 816/360-6945)

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