Blue Beetle is one of DC’s most underrated titles, and one of the few good things to come from the clusterf**k that was Infinite Crisis / One Year Later. Newsarama’s Vanetta Rogers interviews writer John Rogers on what’s in store for the latest Beetle, Jaime Reyes, in the coming year:

NRAMA: How much fun is it to show the world of superheroes through the eyes of true outsiders? I know it’s fun to read — is that the point? To tell the story from a different point of view?

JR: It’s kind of the point of the whole book. Jaime’s not part of the club. And to be frank, neither am I. I came to superhero comics in my late twenties, after years of indies and graphic novels. So, wonderfully, I get to tweak the goofiness of this world that’s very much brand-new to me and Jaime, while writing real old-school comic adventure tales. Jaime’s being introduced to a new world … and it turns out that world is pretty damn cool.

Every now and then, I’ll have to research something, and I come up with some insane tidbit that I never see in the usual continuity of the DCU or a character. I see that as our job — showing you the off-speed viewpoint on your favorite characters. You know, the Beetle/Batman scene in #7 was one and a half pages, and people freaked for it. It actually motivated Waid to use Beetle for Brave and the Bold #3. And I think that was because Jaime didn’t know pre-IC Batman, didn’t know his rep as an icy jerk, and so talked to him differently. Bats responded in kind, and it dimensionalized him somewhat. It was fun. Guy Gardner’s upcoming appearance is similar. Jaime has no idea that Guy’s version of how the DCU works and, well, everybody else’s, those are different things.

NRAMA: You’re also writing about a different culture, since much of the comic takes place in El Paso, Texas, among a Hispanic community. How much of a challenge has that been?

JR: Those are actually kind of the same question, when I think about it. One of the things I learned when writing TV, you don’t write black, white, Hispanic, etc. You write real, well-motivated characters and the ethnicity lend sit a context. But that doesn’t change how you approach a character’s job in the script. I consciously avoid dropping in too many references that would seem … researched. We’ve all been teenagers. We all have relationships with our Dad, our Mom, our friends … just write those, and the reader will often fill in what they need. Every writer has a lens in on every character. Jaime’s Catholic, I’m Catholic, and Irish or Hispanic, that informs your family in a certain way. Just extrapolate out from that.

NRAMA: Last chance, John — for the people who haven’t checked out the series, tell them what they’re missing and why they should give it a chance.

JR: Teenager Jaime Reyes has a spiffy, homicidal armored suit made by aliens who hate him. He has no instruction manual for the armor — that’s stuck in the brain of his mentor, who may soon shoot him in the face. His best friend’s Mom is his nemesis, the other superheroes left him to die in space, and he has midterms and no date for the prom. He’s El Paso’s only superhero. He has no idea how to do that job, and El Paso has no idea how to have a superhero. Jokes are told, things blow up, New Gods and Batman and Green Lanterns and other superheroes visit to punch and wise-crack and occasionally weep over a bloody, tragic demise. It’s old-school adventure comics drawn by an artist you can brag about discovering ten years from now. Come for the ride.

Rogers has taken the lead from Keith Giffen smoothly so far, and I love his approach to the character and his outsider’s take on the DCU. Rafael Albuquerque’s artwork complements him perfectly — I actually like his work better than Cully Hamner’s — and, similar to Freddie Williams III’s great work on Robin, his teenaged characters look like teenaged characters.

If you’re not reading Blue Beetle regularly, you’re seriously missing out on one of the better superhero comics on the shelves right now.

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