Mexican artist Armando Huerta says Cuban American artist Ricky Carralero revived a flagging career by stealing art from Huerta and putting his own signature on it. Carralero says a vengeful femme fatale and an unethical sticker publisher have bribed the destitute Huerta to tarnish Carralero's reputation as a pinup artist/entrepreneur. Inkers Winston Blakely and Luis Sierra say Kirk Lindo hired them to do work on Countess Vladimira for his Vamperotica line but never paid them. Scott Goodell says he is owed money by Lindo's Brainstorm Comics, Carralero and former Carralero publisher High Impact. C.J. Henderson says he is owed more than $500 for a screenplay and a column done for Lindo. Cynthia Johns, aka The Blonde Avenger, says she never received payments contractually due for an issue starring her character done for Lindo's Brainstorm Comics. Lindo says... well, Lindo's not returning the Journal's calls or e-mails. Not much is left of the indy Bad Girl boom of the mid '90s but bad checks and bad blood.

For a time, circa 1995, the adolescent male demographic of the comics-reading public discovered pinup girls, and there was no better way for a small, independent publisher to launch a line of comics than with cover art depicting a large-bosomed babe in latex, preferably sporting fangs or an automatic weapon three times the size of her waist. Cheesecake art has a long history highlighted by the work of artists like Elvgren and Vargas and was known by collectors as Good Girl Art. By the '90s, however, the female subject of this art had lost her baby fat and her innocence, becoming more muscular, aggressive and overtly seductive. The virginal line art of a Betty or a Veronica was replaced by a hyper-realist look that emphasized the artificial perfection (from a male lech's point of view) of its female subjects. Following in the airbrushed tradition of pinup artists Soroyama and Olivia, human flesh gleamed with the same sleek gloss of the rubber, latex and chrome material that surrounded and contained it.

In 1995, there were more than 30 titles hitting comics shops each month featuring anti-heroines with names like Lady Vampire, Ms. Cyanide, Luxura, Lady Death, Draculina, Sister Armageddon, Vampirella, Hellina, Razor, Avengelyne, Vixen, Dawn, Samuree, Violet, Babylon Crush, Girl Squad X, Femforce, Stryke, Blood & Roses, Rose & Gunn, Tiger Woman, Wicked, Assassinette, Heartstopper, Shadow Slasher, Lady Rawhide, Rage and Warrior Nun Areala in tales of softcore sex and violence. Last month there were no more than 10 titles in release that could reasonably be lumped into the Bad Girl category.

Where did they go? The long-legged, top-heavy pneumatic look of the typical Bad Girl figure was, to a degree, integrated into the less explicit environment of mainstream comics, along with many of the more polished Bad Girl artists. Some, however, went the other direction, catering to fans who preferred their cheesecake unencumbered by even the minimal plot mechanics of the typical Bad Girl comic. For this audience, publishers like SQP, Solson and Heavy Metal produced books of airbrushed pinup art: girls who pranced and posed in lingerie and latex and never mind their motivation or backstory.

Double Impasse

Ricky Carralero was an artist whose career moved in this direction. Born Enrique Carralero in 1969 in Puerto Padre, Cuba, he remembers being entranced by watching a neighbor doing illustration work. After two years in Costa Rica, little Ricky's family moved to New York in 1983. Not being a native English speaker, he remembers feeling like an outsider in school until a classmate who happened to be a star of the New York graffiti scene saw the sketchbook that Carralero was perpetually drawing in. Joining the hot graffiti crew, Beyond Your Imagination, Carralero became a popular tagger, whose work appeared on walls and train cars throughout the area -- until police caught up with him.

In 1986, the Carralero family moved to Miami, where he began putting together a portfolio of comics and character designs. Eventually, making the rounds of comics conventions, Carralero hooked up with John Ulloa, who was attempting to get his High Impact Studios off the ground. In 1994, the two launched Double Impact (featuring Bad Girls China and Jazz) with Carralero's art and $50,000 of Ulloa's and Carralero's money. The latter was raised with the help of the parents of both Carralero and Ulloa, who took out second mortgages on their homes. The book was expensive to produce because those were the days of enhanced and multiple covers. According to Carralero, the chromium cover alone ate up close to $50,000.

The gamble paid off, however. Retailers initially ordered 25,000 copies, but customer demand fueled reorders that doubled total sales to 49,500. Carralero was able to pay his parents back, and, by 1997, High Impact was branching out into China and Jazz action figures. Toys R Us wanted nothing to do with the salaciously violent dolls, but the figures nevertheless sold out their run of 70,000 units, according to Carralero.

In 1997, Carralero received art samples in the mail that impressed him with their boldness and their detailed slickness. They were by Armando Huerta, a Mexican artist with little experience and no art-school training. The broader ambitions of the art world held little interest for him; what he liked to do was draw pictures of naked and mostly naked girls. "When I was in the university, they never told me how to paint a woman," he told the Journal. "I made my own pinups, looking at the art of Vargas, Sorayama and, the best of all time, Olivia." After graduating from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in 1993, Huerta's first professional work was for the Mexican edition of Playboy.

Like Carralero, Huerta had been born outside the U.S. in 1969, but unlike Carralero, he'd never been able to make the move to the land of cheesecake opportunity to the north. High Impact was one of four companies in the U.S. that responded favorably to the samples of paintings and comics that Huerta sent out. He went with Carralero, with whom he felt the most immediate rapport as a result of all that they had in common: a language, Hispanic roots and an itch to paint long-legged babes.

Huerta signed a one-year contract to produce 18 pages of art each month and two covers. According to Huerta, Carralero vowed to make the up-and-coming artist famous and bring him to the United States. The first of these promises began coming true right away. Carralero and Ulloa handed Huerta their star characters, China and Jazz, and featured his work in their flagship title, Double Impact. Huerta was given full credit for his art and, by the end of the year, he had a reputation rivaling Carralera's among Bad Girl fans.

The two artists' versions of events begin to diverge drastically at this point. Speaking to the Journal during a recent visit to the U.S., Huerta said, "For the first five months, I got no pay from Ricky. After that, it was a symbolic couple of dollars only." Fed up with the trickling payments from Carralero and presented with growing opportunities to do commercial design work for companies like Coca-Cola in Mexico, Huerta turned his back on Carralera and comics at the end of his contract in February 1999.

In an interview posted on his Web site, Huerta said, "So I quit the dream of making comics and making paintings and start working in graphic design in Mexico as there is too much money. After that, I believe Ricky Carralero lost his house, his wife and everything he have."

By the end of 1999, however, the "too much money" Huerta was making from design work had become not enough money and then no money at all. His commercial-art income having dried up, Huerta decided to approach Carralero again. The Journal asked why he would choose to work for Carralero again when Carralero still owed him money from the last contract. "He still owed me money," Huerta acknowledged, "but he always said, 'I'm going to pay you.'" For all Carralero's faults, Huerta still regarded him as a good stepping-stone to the U.S. because "I know that he knows everyone in the comic industry and also in the art industry."

Carralero's contacts in the "art industry" were so good in fact that he was able to use them to sell all of the original art that Huerta had sent him during the original one-year contract. Huerta learned this to his horror when he asked why it was taking so long for Carralero to return his originals. Huerta said he was told that all the original art had been sold, and that the proceeds had all been spent to cover Carralero's bills. Even this, Huerta was willing to overlook as long as Carralero promised not to do it again. "He told me that he would pay me my percentage for the paintings in the future when things became healthy and I start to work with him again," Huerta said in his Web-site interview, "but I told him that he had to pay me for the paintings in the past and NEVER sell the original paintings that I will deliver to him in the future AND always put my name beside the painting."

While Huerta described Carralero as having lost everything after his star artist had left the first time, the first months of the new millennium were not exactly rosy for Huerta, who found himself dependent on Carralero for his only income. "I had a divorce," Huerta said, "and I lose all my money and all my things and the only work and money I had was with Carralero. I have to pay too much money for bills so I work all day for Carralero."

More than once, Huerta said, Carralero suggested that they could make more money if Huerta's art was sold under Carralero's better-known signature and tried to get Huerta's authorization to place his own signature on Huerta's pinups. "I said, 'I'm never going to sign something like this [authorization],'" Huerta told the Journal. "He said he will return my art when I come to the U.S."

But Huerta's move to the U.S. never materialized and there always seemed to be some reason why Carralero and not Huerta should attend the North American comics conventions. On his Web site, Huerta theorized afterward: "Maybe the people say to Carralero that my work was very awesome and unique and maybe he can't support too much compliments for my art so he started the process of making the people believe that he was actually the artist.... The people never saw ME at a comic convention, so maybe he thought was easy to become 'Armando Huerta'..."

By 2001, Huerta said, "I was tired of Carralero because he promised to take me to America and make me famous and never did." Huerta resolved to eliminate the middleman and sell his own art on his own Web site. He met with a Webmaster to research the way pinup art was being sold on the Internet. While reviewing existing sites, he said, he found that his art was already being sold all over the Web, but not under his name: "I saw like 50 sites on the Internet in many countries with the Ricky Carralero name and my artwork."

Though Carralero didn't know it yet, his friend and protégé had at that point become his bitter enemy. "I needed to make some kind of revenge, so I say to him that I will work on the paintings he asks me to do, but I never did the paintings," Huerta said. "I make him suffer for a while, like a month, because I know that he was supposed to be me and the people will ask him for the art, and ask him and ask him, and of course, it doesn't appear, because I am the artist." Finally, after three months of this cat-and-mouse game, Huerta said, he confronted Carralero with his discovery that Carralero had been taking credit and money for Huerta's art. Carralero responded with what Huerta called "many lies."

To the Journal, Carralero said, "I can honestly tell you this. I am the artist and Armando was not only my closest friend, but one of my best finishers. Please note that Armando was not the only artist that helped me with an original after John [Ulloa] developed a production studio and deadlines."

According to the Carralero camp, what appears to be Huerta art that Carralero has appropriated by putting his own name on it, is actually Carralero art that he is reclaiming after having allowed it originally to go out under Huerta's name. This account is supported by Ulloa in a statement issued Jan. 8, 2003:

"Ricky Carralero is an amazing artist whom I have known and worked with for over ten years. I have seen him create his masterpieces with my own eyes... As commonly done in the industry, my company sought out other artists to work under Ricky's direction to meet the ever-increasing demand. This is when we came into contact with Armando Huerta. At first I was not impressed with Armando's work in that it was too cartoony and needed improvement. However, Ricky saw his potential and insisted that I take him on as part of the creative development team at High Impact Studios. Ricky spent an enormous amount of time with Armando teaching him his style of drawing women from start to finish. Armando was a quick learner and able to acquire Ricky's style in a very short period of time.

"Because of the talent under our belt, High Impact Studios set out to create a series of hardcore adult comics that were designed, color-guided and written by Ricky Carralero and finished by Armando Huerta. The idea was perfect, but we had one problem on our hands: With the money we were making in the 'mainstream' comic-book market, we could not risk tainting the Ricky Carralero brand by launching a hardcore comic book under his name. This is when we made the regretful decision to give Armando Huerta full credit as the artist of these infamous books. Armando soon developed his own fan following and enjoyed the fruits of being a brand-name erotic comic-book illustrator. But soon, things changed. The word got out that Ricky Carralero was really the artist behind the comic books. Armando was devastated and faded out of the erotic art scene."

The Revenge Queen

It's hard to discern much common ground between Carralero's and Huerta's versions of events. And Carralero mysteriously alluded to a story behind the story that had yet to be revealed. "You should note and read over the lines [of Huerta's accusations] carefully," Carralero cautioned the Journal, "and you will see this has nothing to do with art or who Armando Huerta is but the desperate attempt of a fatale attraction bitch from hell and her 'personal' vendetta to destroy me and my career for personal reasons. My problem started with Sandra, the owner of the company, Idan's girlfriend. I'll leave the rest to your imagination for now."

The Journal has a very vivid imagination and was curious to know more about this femme fatale who was allegedly lurking behind the dispute, but Carralero managed to keep his remarks rich with suggestive implication while stopping short of explicit detail. "When I tried to end things, she became a demon," he said. "I would like to get you in touch [with] the person that took daily hundreds of calls from Sandy, listening to her cries, so I could get the phone, the man who would put her on a speaker so he could get work done because he felt horrible having to listen to someone scream and cry and get so desperate on the phone only because I would not pick it up. This happened daily for over a week, then started at my house. It was obvious this person had a problem and I do have plenty of witnesses that participated in this whole thing and saw her actions and reactions. I'm going to do the last thing she would never think I would do out of fear to create personal problems with my wife and family, but she pushed and pushed and soon the world will know why Sandy is so hurt inside."

Carralero described conditions of total war between the two camps, including implanted moles. "She has sent a number of letters [critical of Carralero] to her friends so they can post them [on the Internet]," he said. "We know we have one of these persons playing both teams. I can also prove that. I have fans playing both teams to get me information."

Asked what made the conflict "personal," Carralero balked at saying any more, or even revealing the identity of the mysterious Sandy, until he had spoken with his attorney, saying, "I can contact you once I talk to my attorney, but I tell you this: This is far from over and it is not at all as it seems. Many people are going to feel very bad once everything is out in the open. That you can take to the bank."

In the Journal's experience, "I can contact you once I talk to my attorney" are famous last words. Carralero e-mailed the Journal, "You want a story? It's about time the industry learns the truth! I'll give it to you. Today I'm meeting with my attorneys for lunch." Then a silence fell over the Carralero camp. As is so often the case after meetings with attorneys, the Journal found itself with very little to take to the bank.

Through registration data for Huerta's Web site, however, the Journal was able to track down Sandra Galligan, the self-acknowledged "bitch from hell."

"Yeah, that's me," she said, happily. Asked why Carralero might feel that she is to blame for the conflict between the two cartoonists, she told the Journal, "He's pissed off at me because I busted him. I'm the one who destroyed his career. I'm the Bad Cop, the Revenge Queen."

Galligan moved to Las Vegas from Australia in 1999 and started a Web site devoted to selling music- and movie-related stickers and slap-on decals in 2000. In the course of that business, she encountered Idan York, a fellow Australian, who also had an online sticker and art business called Go Stick It. She approached him about exchanging links between their respective Web sites and ended up forming a more intimate link. "We found out we were both Australian, started talking and we hit it off from there," Galligan said. The two hit it off well enough that they merged both their Web sites and their households, with Galligan moving in with York in Santa Ana, Calif.

In early 2002, Galligan said, "I was doing my usual research, looking for art and I came across one of Armando's images with Ricky's name on it. I immediately said, 'I have to find this guy. Who painted this? This is awesome.'"

Galligan was able to contact Carralero, who sent her samples of what was purportedly his work. According to York, not all of the samples he saw were equally impressive. "I passed on his images initially," York told the Journal. "Then he submitted some of Armando's work [as his own], and I said, 'Great.' We were going to license his entire body of work."

Per their agreement, York said, Carralero sent Go Stick It a disk of images, but these images were different from the ones York had seen. He told Carralero that the images on the disk were unsatisfactory and asked for the images he had seen earlier. When Carralero stalled about sending a new disk of images and other complications arose in his deal with the artist, York said, he began to look for another artist, using the early images from Carralero as a guide. "Idan did his own research on this," Galligan said. He asked his contacts, "Do you know anybody who can paint like this?"

It wasn't long before York got an affirmative response: "People told me they'd only seen one artist who could paint like that: Armando Huerta." Once York got in touch with Huerta, he said, they found that the Carralero art that York had liked was in fact Huerta art with Carralero's name on it.

York did what Carralero had neglected to do: He brought Huerta to the States and, in fact, invited the artist into his own home. Though at presstime, Huerta was back in Mexico, he, York and Galligan shared a home in California for six months, and Huerta plans a permanent move to the U.S. in the future.

Galligan, York and Huerta have launched a Web site called Rickycarraleroscam.com, which is devoted to exposing Carralero as a rip-off artist. The site identifies art that appears in Carralero collections like SQP's The Art of Ricky Carralero, but was allegedly done by Huerta. In the meantime, Carralero said he is preparing his own RickyCarraleroDefence.com Web site that will set the record straight. The site was not yet up at press time.

[To read the rest of this article, please see The Comics Journal #256.]

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