Masked Republic’s Kevin Kleinrock On Creating The Luchaverse, Making An Authentic Series, Why Nakamura Would Make A Good Manga Character

I recently spoke with Masked Republic’s Kevin Kleinrock about the ‘Luchaverse‘ series of comic featuring Rey Mysterio, Pentagon Jr, Fenix and many top luchadors.

The Luchaverse’s third book featuring Tinieblas will debut at New York Comic Con this weekend; the Rey Mysterio One-Shot and Lucha Brothers book are available now:

What is your overall plan for the Luchaverse?

The Luchaverse has always been about creating a brand new story world that will cross the whole kind of transmedia landscape. It’s starting in comic books because that’s the best place that we found to layout the world and its depth and the various series and parts that go into it, but certainly with an eye for developing it for television / streaming / film. Um, some of the series lean more towards animation; I think a Lucha Brothers animated series would be pretty cool. We’re really looking at as an entire story world that can be brought not just onto the comic book page, but on the screen as well.

How much influence do today’s ‘shared universes’ have on the Luchaverse:

I definitely would say that at least structurally, why we took the approach we took was heavily comic book influenced, and not so much wrestling influenced. I know you read the Rey Mysterio one, and you see that these aren’t wrestling comic books, they are comic books that happened to star luchadors in the title roles. Some of them are going to end up with powers or some are just bad asses anyways, who can use their physical strength or guns or whatever the case may be. I think from the initial structure of how we’re doing these series of one shots that kind of all come together that was somewhat influenced by Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers and a kind of story and a world that he wrote.

Certainly looking at what Netflix has done with The Defenders and the series that went into that, how you had Daredevil, Punisher and Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and Iron Fist and they all had individual series that each had a genre or their own, but yet they also have the ability to crossover and there was a overarching story world. So certainly I think that’s a great example of kind of how we see things potentially laid out in the future for where we’re going with the Luchaverse. Would we have come up with the same kind of a premise or outline had the MCU or DCU not existed?

Maybe, it’s definitely a possibility, but seeing what they’ve done certainly provides some context for what I think could be done with the Luchaverse. There’s not a lack of comic books to develop entertainment from out there, but there is a heavy lack of Latinx content—content that is being created by and having a heavy influence from Latin creators with Latin stars. And I think that that combined with the Lucha Libre element puts us in a position hopefully for people to open their eyes to what we’ve created and what it can be.