Meet Vita Ayala, a rising star in the comic book world.
Vita Ayala has enjoyed making stories, but at first did not have a place to put them. Ayala says that they learned to read a bit later than most, at about 10 years old.
“I grew up liking comics and loving comics because you can read them without knowing the words,” Ayala says with a laugh. Ayala says that they learned to read a bit later than most, at about 10 years old.
Learning to read allowed Ayala to actually write down the stories that they had been forming in their mind since they were a kid.
At the age of 19, Ayala started working at Forbidden Planet, a comic book shop in Union Square. Here, the world of comics opened up to them — able to see the different people that were making comics, as well as the many people that just loved reading them.
Ayala went back to work at Forbidden Planet after college, which is where they got their first big break into the industry.
They applied for the DC Comics Writers Workshop, and were accepted. The experience was a couple of months, and not only allowed Ayala to learn about how superhero comics work, but also gave them the opportunity to write a short 10-page story that was published by DC in 2016.
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When asked to describe their brand, Ayala does not hesitate.
“It’s queer and brown,” Ayala says. “That’s just what it is,” they say, laughing happily.
That’s not to say that those are the only types of stories that they are capable of doing, Ayala points out, but that they feel it’s important to write stories that are about people like them.
So, with the all the experience that Ayala now has, what do they have planned for the future?
One goal for this year and the future is doing more creator-owned work.
Ayala also has some projects coming soon, including a mini-series about Nebula, through Marvel, which comes out February 12.
