When I first heard about a possible Booster Gold/Blue Beetle movie I was elated. I love Blue Beetle. To the everyday passerby, he may look like a lamer blue version of Iron Man, but he is great.

His suit is connected to him until death. His suit is not bound by the same physical limits Iron Man's is. It's actually sentient alien technology that talks to him. And he is a teenager who is not a super genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, he's just a kid from Texas who goes to school, has crushes, and has a loser best friend. He is just trying to get by while at the same time juggling family, friends, school, and saving the Earth. Blue Beetle is kind of a Spider-Man/Iron Man rip off with a cooler suit and power set.

Blue Beetle is also great because he was the first superhero I saw myself as. It was not Superman (a favorite) or Batman (whose super power is, of course, money) or any blank slate characters comic artists love. Blue Beetle was my first. The really funny thing is I had to wait until I was sixteen to see him on TV (I missed him on “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” and “Smallville,” mostly cause he appeared just once or twice and was never that important to the plot).

Jaime in "Smallville" looking… bulky.

Jaime looking nice in "Batman: The Brave and the Bold" looking less bulky.

I should at this point take a moment to make some clarifications. Jaime Reyes, the Mexican-American, from El Paso, Texas, who presents as a brown skinned Latino is the Blue Beetle I am talking about. I first saw Blue Beetle in the Second Season of “Young Justice.” And I was amazed that I saw a Latino, who presents Latino, with an obvious brown hue, dark hair and dark eyes, and who occasionally talks/thinks in Spanglish.

Jaime and the Blue Beetle Scarab (his sentient alien suit) meeting.

I should also make another clarification: none of the things I just said in anyway describe all Latinos. Those features are the ones I identity with on physical and lingual level. Jaime Reyes looks like ME. Black, Asian, Indigenous, and white Latinos very well might not identity with Jaime. Much in the same way non heteronormative Latinxs might not identify with Jaime as he presents and performs masculine.

Jaime is also the third Blue Beetle, behind Dan Garret and Ted Kord.

All the heroes to use the Blue Beetle name, left to right: Dan Garrett, Ted Kord, and Jaime Reyes.

Here is where things get worrisome for me. Most of the Blue Beetle/Booster Gold stories involve Ted Kord and Michael Jon Carter, Booster Gold. Using Kord era stories makes sense, seeing as most of the movie going population will need to be introduced to the characters and a team-up movie with the originally two partners makes more sense for an origin story. Jaime only becomes Gold’s partner after Kord dies. The possible movie will at the very least need to mention Kord.

But there are many reasons the main Beetle for the movie should be Jaime.

As on the beginning of 2015 to the end of 2020, Marvel Studios and DC Entertainment will release nearly thirty movies, only one them definitely has a Latinx person as a kind of protagonist, El Diablo and in the latest trailer Joel Kinnaman character Rick Flag refers to him as guy who burns people, presumably alive, so selling me on the label protagonist for him is a harder sell than offering iPhone users a better Android product that looks uglier.

BTWubs "El Diablo" translates to The Devil

As of now, there that is no confirmed Latinx protagonist so far, and Michael Peña’s character from “Ant-Man” does not count as you also can't sell a comic relief character as protagonist especially when he is a criminal who makes his friend commit a crime right after getting out of prison and when his accent is used for aforementioned comic relief and nothing else.

Also his lines are caricatures of what real people say

So 17 percent of the US population, gets no wide released superhero movie . This is not really shocking to me or any Latinx person who watches popular American media. We do not get to be the unbridled good guys, like Henry Cavrl's Superman, who can manage to level an entire city and town to save the Earth, but not the estimated hundreds of thousands of regular people he was responsible for killing, or Christian Bale’s Dark Knight, who for one illegally wire tapped millions of phones and for another kills a LOT people (for someone with a moral code against killing). Latinxs know our role in media. We are the drug dealers, the drug lords, the pimps, the sex workers, the poor one dimensional throwaway characters. Or even better the snitches who rat out their fellow criminals to the all powerful hand of the law.

Thinking that this is logical representation of an entire ethnicity is preposterous. Even if the media representation is someone’s idea of what Latinxs are like, those of us who live with, talk to, work with, and are friends with people who would be “accurately portrayed” by these one-dimensional criminal characters know that the people they represent are human beings not just bad guys. They are complex human beings who are by-products of their environments. They are people for who the system failed and who found comfort, solidarity, and some financial security in criminal affairs, but that was after years of teachers not even trying to teach “problem children,” the media showing them as only criminals, and seeing violence all around them in real-life, to a point that it is as commonplace as the gentrification of San Francisco.

But if I am being realistic, I will not hold my breath for a wide released movie about a real Latinx person’s life of struggle. I know that Hollywood will never make a blockbuster about the the life of an undocumented person in the United States of America who wanted to have an education but couldn't because they were stuck in a state without the DREAM Act, so they lost all hope for the American Dream and had to turn to crime as their way to put food on the table.

Neither will Hollywood ever make a movie about a trans woman kicked out on the street by her family because she couldn't be who she wanted to be so she had to become a sex worker so she wouldn't starve to death in the streets alone, unloved, and forgotten. I would not have a problem with the adaptation of Jaime’s story so that he can be a more centering character. Make Jaime a Latina. Make Jaime queer. Make Jaime undocumented. Make Jaime Afro-latinx. Make Jaime indigenous. The Latinx identity is complex, another straight, heteronormative male does not represent a large part of our populace. So I make a simple request: make a movie about an existing IP (Intellectual property) that has a history on TV and comics so that little brown kids can see one absolute positive role model in the slew of white superheroes that were very obviously not made for them to relate to

I can hear the comic book nerds now: (well actually I heard them when I began my argument)

"But it is not the source materials fault that you don't get a hero and we get 90 percent of them" and it is not. It is the fault of all the white men who first wrote the Golden and Silver Age comics. Back in the day when my grandparents could walk down the streets and see "no Mexicans/blacks" signs around Texas. When white men wrote for white kids. But we no longer live in those simple times. Comic book artists and writers are significantly more diverse now. But the IP’s that they are stuck with, if they enter the big DC or Marvel brands, are forever mostly white and male. If they want to, they can bastardize the character and make them a person of color or a woman.

Or they can try the daunting task of creating an original character from the ground up, pitching it and selling it to their higher ups, making it to a publish, and the hope that the title does not get cancelled before any significant fan base can organically grow. In layman's terms, the historical inaccuracies that the old white men writing for young white boys has sequestered a generation of writers and artists, whom are separated from them, not just years, but by social economic and political progress. So these writers work with what they're given and they write stories that fit a mode that is based on inaccuracies.

This is where screenwriters have significantly more freedom. They have to sell their product to a significantly larger populace. Movie screenwriters are not pinned down by the comic book history nor the errors of the past. As we clearly see this from the bastardization of Deadpool in Wolverine Origins.

Orajel Schumacher's horrible Batman and Robin.

I could really go on and on and on but my point is that the argument that the lore untouchable is ridiculous. But these few examples show the power screenwriters have. They are not limited by the same factors that comic book writers and illustrators are.. So I make another request do the job that other screenwriters have done adapt an existing story or several stories so they can may be more appealing to a wider audience.

If these two very I believe logical arguments I did win you over but let me just get back to a basic Factor coolness. Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle is ten times cooler looking than Ted Kord Blue Beetle.

Again left to right: Dan Garrett, Ted Kord, and Jaime Reyes.

Jamie has the full power of the alien technology that allows him to be a rip off of both Ironman and Spiderman. Ted Kord is another billionaire, and honestly I don’t know how Robert Downy, Jr. makes a billionaire relatable, but I doubt the movie going audience is made up of more than 17 percent billionaires. I'll give it to him that Kord knows martial arts, but not nearly as much as Batman, and Batman is not running around in bright blue spandex… or running around with a gun. Jamie can fly. Ted Kord cannot. Jamie can manipulate the alien technology to create an array of weapons. Ted Kord has a gun.

So DC comics, I ask

Yes, with those puppy eyes.

Make a Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle/ Booster Gold movie.

While I have you here.

Put Kyle Rainer in the Green Lantern movie.

Make a Renee Montoya, The Question Movie.

I gave up on Marvel.

#DonaldforSpiderman