Awesome Con Gallery: Rage Gear Studios
Rey Arzeno and Eric Guerrero's interpretations of superheroes as gay beefcake are highly stylized works, bursting with color and vibrancy.
“It’s almost a sense of relief to be in Pride Alley,” says Rey Arzeno of Rage Gear Studios. “You don’t have to worry about who your neighbor is gonna be.”
Arzeno and his business partner, Eric Guerrero, have been displaying their wares at Awesome Con for more than a decade, and have reliably participated in the con’s Pride Alley, a corridor specifically for LGBTQ creators, since its debut in 2017.
“You book these cons, and you don’t know who is gonna be around you and you don’t know what the crowds are gonna be like,” he explains. But at Pride Alley, the pair can comfortably display their wares, which, while not overtly sexual, possess an extremely gay sensibility.
He recalls doing a Baltimore con once where a parent “grabbed her kid by the neck and yanked him away” from their table. He points out the hypocrisy, however, in that other artists are “drawing Wonder Woman or Super Girl with pronounced nipples and wedgies.”
He adds, “And that’s fantastic! You know? Let’s celebrate that! But a guy without a shirt on isn’t okay?”
Rage Gear’s interpretations of superheroes — both Arzeno and Guerrero are X-Men superfans — and celebrations of beefcake are highly stylized pieces, bursting with color and vibrancy. Their works take on both sensuality — X-Men in crop tops — and a pointed playfulness, as in their ribald nod to the iconic Coppertone ad featuring a frisky Cyclops and a well-hung Wolverine.
“My strength is in anatomy and color,” says Arzeno. “And [Eric’s] strengths are in animation and cartoon — things like Pokémon and anime. I’m more of a comic book-based art. So we can each go into different categories and address different audiences. It helps with the range.”
Shop Rage Gear’s artwork and apparel online at www.ragegearstudios.com and visit them in Pride Alley at Awesome Con.
Awesome Con is April 4 to 6, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. For more information or to purchase badges, visit www.awesome-con.com.
Keep scrolling to see more of Rey and Eric’s works.
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