 Anyway, so I'm going to talk about the work. I'm going to talk about some of my influences. I'm a maker of comics and various types of narratives. My background is in graphic design, teach design history, applied semiotics, design methodology, design, design, design, right? But I'm also interested in like social design, like designs around race, around intersectional identity politics, those types of interesting designs as well, right? So I'm going to start with talking about the idea of the cipher, right? The cipher back to here, right? Any hip-hop fans in the audience? Side of the, okay, yes, yes. All right, so you know what a cipher is, right? You spark a cipher. It's a circle of rappers or MCs who are playing off of each other, usually in a battle format, right? We're trying to like show that you have the best skills as an MC, right? But it's also a circle, right? And so I like this idea of thinking about the influences that led me back to where I'm now, which is to a certain degree, home, right? So I'm gonna start at home. I think a lot about hip-hop and home and different types of like spatial representations. And I'm from Mississippi originally. I grew up in this place called The Sticks in like Off in the Cut, and this place called Floor Mississippi. It's a agrarian space about 15 miles north of Jackson, which is the capital of Mississippi. And so I literally grew up in the middle of Cottonfield, like for real, like not even like the kind of stereotypical ideas, but like literally in the middle of Cottonfield. And one of my favorite things was to stargaze, actually. I used to love to lay on a barn. I know it sounds very Andrew Wyeth, but it's actually what I used to do. And gaze at the stars and think about my connection to them and think about what these other spaces are that are out there, right? And when I was introduced to hip-hop as a series of like cultural making ideologies, it came to me through visual culture, right? Through MTV, my first thing that I watched was Aerosmith and Run DMC walking this way. You know what I mean? Anyway, I really love that stuff, right? But because there weren't any like subways to tag in the middle of Cottonfield somewhere, right? But I love the culture. I love the idea of hard functions. So I call myself a CJ. So this notion of like sampling and remixing, re-explanation of ideas, how these different types of making inform my practice, the way I look at like research, that kind of thing. But I'll start it with, uh-oh, technical problems. Yeah, I'm trying. Oh, here we go. All right, with these individuals, right? My grandmother and my mother. The first artist that I encountered, right? I was raised by my grandmother, my mom. Sherri May Thompson, also known as Momo. Everybody else called her Big Mama. I got to call her Momo. Janie May, my mom. They messed me up pretty good. Let me tell you how. So now looking back at my research, I realized that my grandmother probably was a conjure woman. She probably was. Like she had these particular ideologies and superstitions that I think were directly connected to conjure culture, root work, hoodoo culture, that kind of thing, which has been influenced in a lot of the work that I've been doing fairly recently. My mother just liked really cool stuff and she shared it with me. I pretty much grew up in grindhouses, second run movie theaters. Anything that was violent, had a ninja in it, we're probably gonna watch it. Oh my God, if it had blood and ninja in the title, we're definitely gonna watch it, right? And we'd have discussions about these particular ideas. And I think it's because, and I didn't know my real grandfather at the time, but my mother's father was murdered, right? And this is important for later on, and violently. And I think, and this is me just thinking back through this stuff, thinking about how those stories deal with trauma or unpack particular types of cathartic ways of looking at trauma, right? And I think that she was doing like conspicuous consumption because we watched a lot of horror movies. It's probably stuff that I really shouldn't have been watching, but we had like long protracted conversations about it, you know? So imagine like kid growing up in the middle of the country collecting like bugs and thinking about stories, looking at stars, listen to a hoodoo lady. That's how I ended up in this space, right? So the cipher starts here, right? So recently a lot of my work has been associated with what's been called Afrofuturism, basically black science fiction, black speculative cultural production. And it started with these particular images. I started thinking about the fungibility of the black body, the replication of black stereotypes in popular media and how they just keep popping up. I'm kind of a stereotype hunter actually, you know? Hunt them down, unpack them, try to figure out what they are, how they function, that kind of thing. So I was doing a, I was on a, the first diversity scholar in residency at James Madison University. You know how they have to like slide diversity in there so they can get it funded? You know, I was the first one though. So I was there for two weeks, right? And you get a show as well. So I went to do a show in Japan. I was carrying the show over there and I was really influenced by robots and how they dealt with this idea of like the constructed body or they're dealt with this notion of like how the black body becomes like an extension or an artifice that's connected to colonialism, that kind of like, the soft machine, like literally the soft machine. And how like when somebody created a cotton gin, it was really like an upgrade, right? Oh, we can just throw away that old technology. We have a new thing now, right? What are we gonna do with these guys? So anyway, so this particular series is called Matters of the Fact. I named it after Frans Fanon was the fact of blackness. Highly influenced by like Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto as well, but also started looking at how if you're a black cyborg and you connect it to a system of oppression, then maybe it's not so much. Maybe it's not a good thing to be a cyborg, right? So I thought about the series for like about four months and I just kind of simmered on it. There's 70 of these images. I created them in four days. It was almost like they just came out of me, you know? And it's kept making, kept making, back breaking. I didn't get up, you know? I barely rested. I just made images, right? And so they started talking about like reappropriation of older images around blackness, systemic issues around oppression, but also how black people in America connect to Africa through buying commodities that aren't necessarily connected to their actual tribe of origin or space of origin, but kind of represent and do an indexical way, you know, a connection to Africa, right? And you sell that and we buy it and sell that, you know? And so this idea of the commodity of blackness and how these particular things keep popping up. But these are called matters of the fact. It's like really black cyborgs where I kind of started thinking about these ideas. And one of my friends who's an Africanist looked at him, she says, oh, these are Afrofuturists. And I was like, you're making up words. What is that thing that you said? The Afro, what? Yeah, these are Afrofuturists. I was like, okay, so I started doing research in that area and before you know it, I was like, okay, this actually is something that is a mode of cultural production that's been around for a while. Particularly when you think about like the idea of technology as an extension of identity, which I think is fascinating. So of course these are all based off of stereotypes, pushed from jungle bunnies and that's called Bakers' Burden, right? So those types of images. And again, there's like 70 of these and this is just like a snippet of them. One of the things that was really interesting again about it is like the replaceability, the fungibility of the black body, how like one particular part could just be like placed for another during slavery, right? And so that was actually part of it as well. The other thing I've been doing a lot of is book cover design. I'm your book cover guy. I'm trained as a designer, like I designed these books as well as like helped put them together. I'm really into like book design, material culture, that kind of thing. And so I get tapped to do a lot of book design. So some of my colleagues will hit me up and I'll just do like a lot of illustration work and that kind of thing. So practice-wise I'm still an active freelancer. So I do like a lot of freelance work dealing with like promotional work usually around like the black speculative idea. As far as like process-wise, I still do a lot of drawing by hand as classically trained as a, my minor is in drawing. So I do like a lot of figure drawing but I also do a lot of manipulation through digital technology. So I use Photoshop, Illustrator or the whole like creative suite package, right? And also design my own cover. That's my collection. As you notice, I like sampled my own work too. The idea of like sampling and remixing is something that's really interesting to me. This is from a series that I did for, this thing we did called Black Geek Week at University of Illinois. I used to teach at University of Illinois for eight years I was there. I was contacted by the Black House. That's the cultural studies center for African-American studies. And they wanted to do this week-long celebration of various types of black nerd culture. So we looked at black engineers, physicists, comics, everything and just kind of did a celebration. And these are some of the series that I did for that. Here comes the black comics. So what started me thinking about this was, I was working on a show that was a response to the Masters of American Comics show which was in 2005 out of the Hammer Museum out west. 15 of the greatest cartoonists to ever touch a quill pen. No women in the show. I was like, okay, so you can't be a master, okay. So these are the Masters of American Comics but, you know, Wendy Penney's not in the show or other female artists, no non-female artists in the show. So anyway, there were also no people of color in the show and also it talked about a particular type of comic that was being talked about in that show as far as like from a particular era. A lot of people I really love like Jack Kirby who was a huge influence of mine. Walt Kelly, Joe Simon, people like that. But not the Brothers Hernandez, for instance, we're not in there, for Love and Rockets. Not even Scott McLeod though who's like one of the big commerce theorists, right? So I was like, okay, what were the criteria for this? You know, I don't get it. Chris Ware was in there, but again, those particular artists were responding to a particular subset of a type of comic book. Now I did kind of misrepresent the fact that there weren't any people of color in the show. There was George Harriman who was actually passing for white actually. He's actually, they thought he was Greek, you know, but he used to do Crazy Cat back in the day. It's like 1928, he's the Crazy Cat. So other than that, you know, so me and my friend Damien started working on a show called Out of Sequence, which I don't have images from because I didn't want to go into it too much, but we were looking at diversity writ large, like not only who was making the comics, how they were being produced, you know, gallery comics, web comics, basically the idea of the persistence of a particular type of mediation. You know, that's what we were really interested in. So instead of 15 artists, we had like over 60 artists, 214 pieces, and it was at the University of Illinois, and it was probably one that I thought was one of the most innovative comic shows ever, but it happened in the middle of a cornfield. I don't know if he'd been to the University of Illinois, but it was on either coast, I think it probably went a bigger show. Been a bigger show. So what starts to happen is once we like realized that we wanted to do this show, we realized we had never curated a show before. So we did a practice show at Jackson State called Other Heroes, and it was supposed to be a small show to kind of like practice curation. Ended up being 148 pieces, like over 20 or so artists, it was nuts, but it was all African-American artists and talking about stereotypes in comics. This particular book kind of came out of that discussion. You know, we didn't want to get a wise black comic book artist, but what started happening was we were looking at this culture that was kind of simmering since the 1990s, like early 90s, that a lot of people call the black age of comics. And so the gentleman that coined that particular term was Turtle On Lee, who was a black comic book publisher himself and distributor. It's kind of like the master Pia comics. What he would do is get content by black creators and literally like drive them around from space to space and sell them out of the back of his car, right? So he was like, I've heard about the golden age comics, heard about the silver age comics, bronze age comics, what about the black age? And so before you know it, you have these independent black spaces that are selling independent comic books, you know? And that's what this is a collection of, right? It's out of print, unfortunately, so. The other thing is I love collaborating, right? So I do a lot of collaborative works. I love working with movers, like dancers and choreographers. I love making work about translations between movement and other types of visual culture. So this is Cynthia Oliver. She is a teacher of dance at University of Illinois. And we were having dinner and over wine, we were talking about the differences or the connections between comics and dance, you know? I didn't realize at first that they don't have like dance classes, they have composition classes. You realize that? They actually have composition classes. Choreography literally means dance writing, right? So I like this idea of the body as a dance, as a mark making instrument, right? So that's a graphic design tool right there. So how do we deal with that particular space? So this was called Closure for Blood, Guttas for Veins. I think, I don't know how many glasses of wine we were into before we came up with this, but it was like about a 15 minute presentation of her student dancers. It was the first time I did this kind of stuff. So I had to be at every curtain call, I had designed costumes, I did like a lot of the scenery, that kind of thing. And this was a few years ago. But I love working with, I love working with Cynthia, but I also loved working with dancers in general. So we're working on a new piece called Virigo for Space in Vermont, that deals with Jamaican masculinity politics and visual culture. She's of Jamaican descent, so a lot of her movement vocabulary is from the Afro-Caribbean space. And just sees the stills, just from the performance, which I kind of love as stills, you know? Then it brings us to Junkanoo. This is a project that I worked on with Akitha Carey and Deborah Dudley. Again, I was thinking about this idea of translation of choreography as a writing instrument. So I know you guys do this all the time. We put like mapping things, all the people's bodies. It probably costs like a gujillion dollars, right? Gujillion simoleons, right? All right, so this costs like 10 bucks. Went to like the dollar store and I took these lights, put them all over our body and filmed them at low shutter speed, which you're probably familiar with, right? So by themselves are really interesting compositions, right? But you can actually start to see some of the calligraphic motion that's happening, right? Now Akitha Carey created her own dance vocabulary called Carap Funk, where she took like Afro-Caribbean movement vocabularies and fused it with modern dance. So he's trying to figure out ways to codify that and kind of disperse it, right? And so I was like, well, let's do some experiments with different ways of like translating into other forms, right? So what I did is I sampled snippets from these motions, from these light forms and just created a typeface called Jukia. And I based some of this stuff off of the Caribbean, excuse me, the Bahamian carnival space, which is called Junkano, which is where we got the title of the project from. And I just started doing some experiments with these typographic forms. I want to do some more with these, but these are just some experiments we did based off of the translation of like this objectified, like female body into like this really symbolic, kind of a symbolic language. That brings us to Black Kirby, which is probably like one of the most extensive, like ongoing collaborative projects that I've worked on. So I was talking to Stacy Robinson, who's my collaborator with Black Kirby. And this is around the time that any comic scholars, comic scholars in the audience, right? There are some people, right? You remember the lawsuit that was going on between Jack Kirby's family and Disney, as far as like remuneration for his creations for Marvel Comics in particular, right? This is around the time the first Avengers movie came out and made like a billion dollars worldwide. I'm like a billion dollars, right? So I don't know if you know it or not, but a lot of artists are still paid in the comics industry page by page to get a page rate. And of course, if you're working for like the big two, DC and Marvel, then you're getting, well, you're basically, you're working on their characters. You don't own those characters, right? And so Jack Kirby, even though he was like one of the greatest cartoonists to ever live and was really like part of creating like, an entire universe. We're talking the Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men. I don't know if you're familiar with these at all, right? You know, you watch comic book movies. Okay, thank you. All right. You know what those are. All right, cool. All right, so he co-created all this stuff, right? And family was like, well, I know it was work for hire, but maybe you could break us off some money. That would be nice. And they're like, no, we're not gonna do that because we're Disney and we're evil. So we're not gonna do that. All right, so Stacy and I didn't think that was right. We was like, you know what? That's not right. They treating that better like he was black. So Black Kirby, it was like, hey, there you go. Black Kirby. So then we started thinking about the connections between some of the metaphorical things that we're talking about in the X-Men. The fact that they did create the first major black superhero, the Black Panther, four months before the Black Panthers called themselves that, by the way, which I thought was extremely interesting. So a lot of those particular types of connections, we just made more explicit, right? There's this kind of thing about Malcolm X being like Magneto and Charles Xavier being Dr. King, which is totally, that's probably not right. But it's interesting though, right? It's interesting, you know? And so they actually created some really problematic characters too. Like why is the black racer the spirit of death black? I don't understand. First it's like, why is he on skis? That's the first thing. But then also why is he this black character, you know, of death anyway? So the conflation of death and blackness is something that's like historical, right? The other fact is that we look at forever people, there's a character called Viking the black, and he happens to be the black character. I was like, okay, well, that's interesting as well. So anyway, so we started thinking about like Black Kirby and his alternative universe where he was informed by black power politics, because guess what? In the 60s that kind of stuff was jumping off, right? Maybe instead of being informed by North mythology, he was informed by Afro-Caribbean mythology or like West African mythology. So the mighty Thor becomes the mighty Shango. Same guy, you know? He has an axe instead of a hammer, but you know, it's the same kind of character. And then we started thinking about constructions of monstrosity around blackness. So instead of the incredible Hulk, he's the unkillable buck, right? Which is actually extremely telling when you look at like some of the descriptions of the black body now, particularly if you look at like Darren Wilson's description of Michael Brown when he's shooting him. He was a demon, he was a monster, right? So this idea of the golem from Jewish mythology and how it again becomes an idea around the grotesque, right? And how these particular ideas start to kind of play themselves out. And Jack Kirby's work had all kinds of golems in it, like you have the thing, you know, it's a golem. He was Jack Kirby, you know? He was pretty much like this bulky rock guy, right? That's Jack Kirby. That's how he saw himself. So anyway, so these are remixes of these particular types of ideas and just kind of sampling, remixing Jack Kirby's aesthetic, but also adding our own influences from Afrofuturism, from hip-hop, from black power politics. That was the uncanny kings, man, you know? And then it was funny because the guy was no Scott Free. He's this character called Mr. Miracle. He's the ultimate escape artist. I was like, oh, let's call him Gil Scott Free. And then my friend was like, you know what, you didn't have a Jill Scott Free. I was like, you know what, you're right. And that's kind of like how it was. It was like a really interactive thing. But his idea of like, you know, this black character whose ultimate escape artist was just, I mean, it's too good to pass up. The unkillable buck returns. All right. Yeah, so our process was this. I mean, sometimes I would draw something and pass it off to Stacy. He would mess around with it, send it back to me. There's a lot of call and response involved and that kind of thing. So as far as like the critical making aspect of it was really fun. So over a month and a half, we made 120 images. And we've actually like shown this worldwide actually. So, and we're actually starting to talk about stories. So this is Dark Side remixed as Black Hand Side. This particular piece was actually eight feet tall. It was called the Funky Totem Series, that kind of thing. We also did these abstract comics. Abstract comics are basically like narratives that are a sequential in nature, but actually not objective. So this was influenced by DJ Spooky, one of my favorite media theorists, but also it's a good DJ, you know, so. And so this whole piece was like inspired by some of his quotes. So it's like the only finished comic in the whole series about 36 pages, right? Which brings us to Kid Code. What was happening with the Black Kirby stuff is that we were making these kind of prototypes of magazines that could have been, or that would be, or might have been, right? And people were like, well, so when's that book coming out? I was like, it's an art piece. It's like pop art, you know? When's that major center cover piece coming out? I said, no, it's not a book. It's actually not a book, no. And then we started thinking like, okay, well, let's make some original books. So we started making original content as Black Kirby. So Kid Code is really influenced by my love for time travel stories. I'm a massive Doctor Who fan. Mahuvian, straight out of Gallifrey. I love that stuff. I love it. I grew up reading that work. I mean, excuse me, watching that work. And it just totally influenced the way I look at sci-fi. So that's why I had this long scarf. It's based on Tom Baker. That's the only Doctor Who, sorry. You could fight about it later, but that's my Doctor. Anyway, so if you take like Doctor Who and you mix it with like Green Lantern, and African Embodder, and like Remelzi a little bit, there you go. So the story is like this. I'm gonna break down the story and pitch it to you. At the beginning of time, that was the God MC, right? God MC spoke the world into existence. He had this crew called Lords of Light that hung out with them. Some of them were haters. So what ends up happening is they sampled his voice, they sampled God's voice, and he remixed the entire universe to what this mess is, the dark mix, right? So his other homeboy, Father Time, created the Knights of the Infinite Digging. See, Kid is actually a title, Knights of the Infinite Digging. So basically they traveled through this like time quilt that's constructed by these four DJs called Unfaithable Four. The quilt is called The Incredible. So he jumps through these pieces and they're trying to collect up the shards of God's original voice to remix it to the original format. So it's almost like a shout out to, it's like shout out to Afrofuturism, but also to these notions of like old school hip-hop. And there's an anti-capitalist narrative too because the main villain, the hater, is called The Power. So as you can see as the grill, this is cream, which is cash, roux, everything around me, right? And so they're trying to stop the power from remixing the universe and stopping the universe using channel zero. Because every time we get close to stopping him, he resets everything. So we have to find channel zero, stop that. So it's kind of a Star Wars narrative too. It's a big mix mash of a lot of different things. And the aesthetic is pretty much based off of some of the stuff we were really into with Jack Kirby's work, but also like graffiti. The idea of like the formal notions of graffiti. So it's like all over the place. And our first book is like 40 pages long. People are like, oh my God, it's like $1.99, like 40 pages, what are you gonna do next with this? So right now we're working on the second part, you know? And it's published by Rosarium Publishing, which is one of the most progressive publishers of like science fiction and fantasy right now. They do like comics, but they also do original prose work, very diverse writers there, you know, from various backgrounds. While I love about it, they have like a, kind of a women's initiative. They want to actually publish more women who are writing science fiction and fantasy. So it's a great company owned by Bill Campbell. And he did some of the spreads from Kid Code. Brings us to Night Boy. So I don't know if you've been watching the news, but it seems that there's been a lot of police brutality against the black body in major cities, right? So this particular character is in response to that. Character's real name is Jamal Jemison from Chicago, really big comics fan himself, artist. Been sketching this image of himself actually. Him and his cousin are coming out of a comic book store and they get into it with a cop. His cousin is killed, Jamal is injured. While he's convalescing in the hospital, he's visited by these two night spirits. And given this mantle of the, of basically like the Paladin of the Dark, his powers come from deferred dreams. So, and he also is a shadow bender. So he can actually take shadows, bend them to his will. But basically all the potential energy of his cousin's life cut short. His father's dreams, his grandfather's dreams, he can actually call upon those particular powers to actually aid him. So he's a shadow shifter. But really what he is like kind of a guard girl character. So he guards us from these night spirits. And that's another project we're working on right now. It's gonna be a hybridized form. So it's gonna be like graphic novels, but also prose as well. What I love about is that a lot of it's gonna be about the family, you know. So that's this little sister who's a brilliant, brilliant girl who discovers that he actually is night boy. He said, can I ask about, we can talk about it. Another thing I was really proud of was artist against police brutality, which is a comics anthology. My friend Bill Campbell called me after the Eric Garner non-decision. And it was irate what we up out of a nap. I don't get a lot of those. And he wanted to do something about it. So basically what we started working on was a collection of stories about police brutality from comics, but also analysis from like scholars. And all the proceeds are going towards the Innocence Project. So that's the current project that's up right now as well. 61 artists and participants, excuse me, like in scholars. And again, this is from Rosario in Publishing, which he named after his daughter by the way. His daughter's name is Rose, so that's kind of cool. This is one of my favorite and most painful pieces. This is about Barbara Brandon Croft. And I don't know if you can see the date on this, but she's talking about police brutality, but the date is like 2000, right? It almost didn't make the volume until I showed it to Jason Rodriguez and I was like, dude, look at the date on this. It's like 16 years ago, right? Still the same problem, still the same issue, still the same assassination of the black body. And so we were dealing with this with the comics piece, which I love about the fact that comics are so irreverent and they can deal with these types of issues. I'm sorry about Harper and about it, but it's what I study for obvious reasons. It's part of what I do. So I was like looking at the construction and the destruction of the black body. ABG, their stuff is so good. Look at that. She actually does like a zombie comic book. It's called Nothing Good Happens at 3 a.m. in the morning. Or nothing good, it's so good. Anyway, and it's a portrait that's kind of become like the, this is by Ashley Woods and she did like these caricatures of some of the victims, like the most famous victims. What's really interesting about this book though is by, it just came out and since the Eric Garner incident up to the publication, which I think is where I met Sasha during mice, right? Over almost 900 people have died since then at the hands of police brutality. So, and those people are listed in the back. So again, I've been doing a lot of Afrofuturism covers. For some reason, I kind of stumbled into helping to shape the aesthetic of like what's been looked at as Afrofuturism these days. So these are some of the covers. Octavius Bude is really interesting because it starts to deal with the idea of how these various like grassroots black political movement start to intersect with black speculative culture, right? And so I've been thinking about this notion of what I call the black speculative arts movement and how it kind of parallels some of the things that were happening in the black arts movement, which was the sister to the black power movement, right? And so me and my friend, Rinaldo Anderson, who is editing this two volume piece from Lexington Books with Charles Jones, he's calling it Afrofuturism 2.0. So he's looking at Afrofuturism and black speculative culture through various lenses. So we have someone writing about religion from performative culture, from aesthetics, various types of writing and epistemologies looking at this culture, looking through this culture as a lens. And so we put together a manifesto that we're kind of passing around right now. He also is the co-curator of the Unveiling Vision Show which I'll talk about in a second. But this is, again, from Rosario Publishing. This was the first book that actually got them some notoriety dealing with black speculative culture and black speculative writing from various standpoints. And so it's an anthology. As I had stated earlier, one of the things that I've been interested in is building community spaces. I'm really into theashti gaze right now. I think I mentioned this to some other people earlier, but his process is building community. He has MFA in like studio art. He's a potter and he's in Chicago. And what he's been doing is using his money from making art to buy old dilapidated buildings in Chicago and revamping them in terms of the community art spaces. What I've been doing recently is thinking about creating these kind of think tanks and spaces where a collaborative energy can be shared, both creatively, politically, around black speculative culture. So Astro Blackness was something I founded at Loyola Marymount with Adilifu Nama, who wrote this book called Black Space. He's a film studies professor and also he did his book called Super Black, which is about black superheroes actually too. And so we started working out how to go about this kind of like colloquium. And we've done it for two years and we have a spin-off. I'm gonna talk about that in a second. We're gonna do a third one next year and it's in LA and some of the top black scholars and creators in this genre come and talk about this work in that space. Nalo Hopkinson calls it the black sci-fi church because it's kind of like what it is. One of the other things that's been happening is that this black underground independent comics culture has cons. There's a convention circuit actually. The oldest one is in Philly. It's called the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention. It's been around for 14 years, right? You ever seen it, never heard of it? No, maybe? Yeah, it's there though, right? It's right in front of you. There's also Kids Comic Con created by Alex Simmons. There's one called MecaCon that's in Detroit. There's another in Detroit called the Motor City Black Age of Comics. It's one in Atlanta that's been around for eight years called OnyxCon. There's a system of these particular conventions and I've added a couple more. So a few years ago we founded the Black Conberg Festival at the Schomburg where me, Jonathan Gales, Deidre Holman who works there, and also Jerry Kraft who's been doing Black Conberg Day at Hu-Man Bookstore, which is now unfortunately defunct, founded the Black Conberg Festival at the Schomburg Center. The first one brought in about 1200 people and it was wild. It was like the Schomburg was not ready for that. I don't know if you've been to that space but they were not ready for that kind of geekery to jump off at a library. We're talking about a space where Langston Hughes' ashes are buried in the foundation, right? And comic book geeks and like what is going on? So yeah, it was pretty wild. So then we've done a couple more. This was the fourth annual. I'll show you some pictures from that. And I was like, okay, well, let's see if we can do something on the West Coast. So I was working, I do a seminar with the MFA program on comics in San Francisco. And one of my best friends is married to Aaron Grizzell. His name's Collette. And he is the CEO of the MLK NorCal, which is like the MLK Foundation of San Francisco. And it's pretty big actually. They do a massive MLK festival there. We're talking like 30, 40,000 people come out to do a march and end up at the Yerba Buena Art Center and they split off into different festivals. So the Black Comic Arts Festival is the 12th festival that they're doing. So that he's over all these festivals simultaneously. Pretty much a one person enterprise. It's pretty wild. So our first one brought in about 1,600 people, you know? So what I did was I do this one in New York and Harlem. I jump on a plane in the middle of that one. I fly out West. And so I do both on MLK weekend. And then I pass out later, because this is pretty wild. This year, these are the posters from this year. So at the Schomburg, we had about 6,000 people. Maya was there actually and complaining about the amount of people. And I want that to happen, because here's the thing. One of the misnomers about Black Folk is that we don't like science fiction. We don't like fantasy. We don't like comic books. We don't like any of this stuff. And I'm like, no, I was born and raised on this stuff. This is what my culture is. And so you had this massive turnout. I told the dean earlier, it was like that new iPad or iPhone was dropping or something. People were queued up, right? Trying to get up in there to buy independent Black comic books. It was out of control. And we had pieces about Afrofuturism. We had a panel about publishing. We had a whole panel about Black geek culture. And the fact that it's now a new journalistic enterprise. You have all these podcasts and magazines and everything that's covering this. And it's funny though, because when I've been interviewed by major news sources about diversity in comics, right? And they want me to talk about Black Panther and Falcon being Captain America and all this kind of stuff. But I always mentioned this culture. And they never published me talking about this culture. I talked to this woman, African-American reporter from CBS, for two hours, two hours about this. And I said, sister, that's what I said. I said, sister, she's a sister. I know you're not going to use this, because it's not talking about the mainstream. But if you really want to see diversity, a representation of us come to this space. I saw two Marvel editors at this day. It was pretty interesting. And they were like, what is going on? Right. Because David Walker was there, who was writing like, he was writing shafts, and he was writing like cyborg and other things, right? These are some of the people there, just kind of showing off the shirts. This is my publisher. That's Bill Campbell. That's Jason Rodriguez. This is the Rosarium table. Some of the wares there. You have Black Panther outside with the queue, see? In the middle of Harlem. This particular line was wrapped around the bill in a couple of times. That's David Walker, who is an avid, like, independent critic, scholar of various types of media, actually, particularly film, and filmmaker too. But he's writing like Power Man and Iron Fist. He just stopped writing cyborg. He wrote the Shaft comic book based off the novels. And he's getting ready to write Nighthawk for Marvel. And he sold out by like 3 o'clock. He was sold out. Someone gave him a book, and he put it on his table. Someone tried to buy the book that someone gave him. It's like, because that's how much that particular crowd has been ignored, you know? And so these particular spaces are feeding that hunger. The other thing I did is I co-founded SoulCon, which is the first Black and Latino convention, which is at Ohio State University. Columbus, Ohio is a big comic town. That's where the Cartoon Research Library is. The Billy Ireland. So this was the first time that this has jumped off as a Black and Latino independent con. The next one's going to be October 14th. Numbers weren't as good, just for different reasons. But I think that by moving it to the library, it's going to be a lot better. So it's already been green lit. Yeah, it was a great time. So Unveiling Visions was a show that took off teaching to do at the Schomburg. And it was looking at the material culture and the ephemera around producing Black speculative culture. So like book cover design, poster designs. The other thing we were doing was like diegetic prototypes of things that were talked about in speculative fiction written by Black people. Like for instance, I mentioned it earlier, like George Shiller's Black No More chair. The chair from Black No More, the story that could turn Black people into white people. But not quite, you know? So we were like, well, what does that chair look like? Or the pig detector from a Miri Baraka's story called The Pig Detector. So what does that look like, you know? Or the Afrohorn from Henry Dumas's piece. Or even more recently, the megascope from this sci-fi story that W.E.B Du Bois wrote in 1908 that it just discovered some objects. So what does objects look like? We put those into this show using the trope of the data thief. The data thief was a construct, because it's a construct that came from this documentary, came out in the late 1990s by John Akonfra, that looked at Black digital music. It was called The Last Angel of History. The data thief was pretty much a time-traveling archeologist and was a huge pleasure. Was a huge influence on kid code actually too. So losing people as soon as asleep, sorry. Anyway. Yeah. I know, that's true. There you go. Anyway, now I've had coffee, so I'm good. Thank you. What was interesting though is that we were utilizing the technology. So all this stuff is like reprints of things, right? So we're utilizing this space as an archive. So what happens when someone who's an archeologist becomes like a curator, a time-traveling curator, right? Starts pulling from all these different spaces. And we were able to put up this really kind of robust show. About 10,000 people visited it at the Schaumburg. It's a really fun show, and it's probably going to travel now, which I'm excited about. Right now we're finishing up the publication. We have 15 really strong essays for the piece. I have to finish my intro and working. So yeah. What we did is we divided up all of these spaces. The Black Fantastic dealt with Black Fantasy. But a space called Dark Matters dealt with this construction that I call the ethnogothic. We had things dealing with music and technology, that kind of thing. So we try to look at all the different types of material cultures and how they informed Black cultural production in this space. I love the fact that you can see the archive. And you can kind of see Aaron Douglas's work. I love the fact that you can see the past and the future and the present simultaneously. And it's an aside for itself, right? And it's some of the layout. Now, I have to think, like, I sense to come out of John, who's the new director of galleries there, because I wanted to be like a street seed. I wanted to be like opulent. Everything that you see, I wanted to be three times bigger. I wanted people to walk in and be like, oh my god. She would not allow me to do that. But that's cool. So we worked out a medium, right? So one of the things, another thing I took off time to do is work on the adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred. I won't go into how I stumbled into that project, but I'm extremely grateful. I'm also like, oh my god, what am I doing? Because it's a 240-page, full-color book. Right now, I'm in the middle of doing the breakdowns for the pages. And one big thing is that the estate for Octavia Butler has already signed off on the book. So that was a big deal. So because if they didn't like it, it was a no-go. And it was hours. And I would have cried into my computer. But they liked it. So these are some of the early character sketches for Kindred, some of the main characters. And I'm going to show you pages from it. Like only the estate and some other people have actually seen pages from it. But that's Rufus and Alice and other. These are early, early sketches. That's what the covers go look like. It's Prologue. You guys know the story? OK, they're about. So here are some of the early images of it. Can't wait to be done with this project. I'm excited about it. It's a lot of damn work, though. Because once I finish the breakdowns, I'm going to go back and draw everything over again and color it and bail in all the artwork for it. So it's a labor of love, but it's a lot of work. But it's going to be cool, because it's going to be, it's going to come out next year, hardcover, really nice printing. It's going to be marketed internationally. It's going to be, it's a big deal. Probably in time for her, it would have been her 70th birthday, actually. So that's going to be really cool. All right. So as a space, I think Afrofuturism has been used as a catch-all for everything black and speculative, which I don't think is necessarily the case. Like Kindred, for instance, Octavia Butler herself calls it a dark fantasy. She actually frames it that way. It's not like people know how the time travel happens. All she knows is she's popping from one time zone to the other. There's not a TARDIS, a time machine that's active. She's shifting because of this connection to a traumatic space. And so the other narratives like that, too, where this kind of time travel is happening mystically. So I started thinking about other ways of thinking about the black speculative. And a lot of it came from looking at comics like Cloak and Dagger, where it's a very problematic comic from the 90s to deal with both racially and gender politics is very problematic. But the black male is an open space. He's basically a disembodied cloak that eats you, which is actually one of my influences for the whole, actually, too. But it's a very gothic space. And gothic in a way that we're talking about ideas around other, around a grotesque, around a monstrous, fictitious histories, those types of tropes of the gothic. And how the gothic as a space relate to black experiences in America in general, could be associated with those particular types of spaces. So stories like Candy Man, which really is like an anti-miscegenation narrative, right? Tanana Reeve Do's work, who is the black female Stephen King, that's who she is. Tales from the Hood, Sugar Hill, the character from Tales, what was it done? Oh my God, what's the name of it? Trilogy of Terror with the little Zuni doll that's chasing down, can't you remember? Yes, she's like, yeah. All those characters, they're problematic, but they're dealing with these really shadowed spaces that aren't really talking about science fiction and fantasy in the way that we're thinking about the future, right? But for some reason, they'll take sunrise music and shove it under Afrofuturism. I think it probably fits there, but spaces like Daughters of the Dust, for instance, I think by Julie Dash, that to me is a gothic narrative. Like you have the present and the future and the past coexisting and the future is like haunting the present. It's like wonderful movie, but it's kind of, it freaks you out. And so a lot of it deals with these spiritual spaces that I don't think science fiction really, readily deals with. Like this idea of the ghost as a reified agent of trauma, and how do you deal with that? Beloved, for instance, by Toni Morrison, that's a scary story, that's a ghost story. The Ark of Bones by Henry Dumas, that's a ghost story. Dealing with this idea of the transatlantic slave enterprise and how that informs race in America, right? So that's what these particular pieces are. This is actually from a five-part visual essay I did for Obsidian Magazine about what I term as the ethnogothic, right? Which I've been kind of obsessed with. So most of the projects that I'm dealing right now are taking us back to Mississippi. So this particular character, his name is Frank Half-Dead Johnson. He's the fictitious cousin of Robert Johnson, the blues man. What happens is due to a racialized violent issue in that episode, his family is killed. And so instead of wanting to be a virtuoso at the blues guitar, he wants revenge, which makes perfect sense. He wants justice, he wants revenge, he wants to be at peace in some fashion. So instead of like getting this virtuosity with an instrument, he wants to become a very powerful conjurer so that he can actually exact revenge against the people that killed his family. And that's what he does. And then what happens is he immediately regrets his decision, figures out a way to trick the devil into letting him out of his agreement a little bit. He actually beats the devil at craps. Seems like the devil can only throw sixes, so he tricks him. And he moves to Chicago to apply his trade. The devil's like, hey, you know what, I like you, man. I'm gonna give you half of your soul back, Dustin named Half-Dead. And you have to work for me for a couple hundred years on this blues song I'm working on. Seems that souls resonate in a particular tonality. And he's composing a blues song for Rapture. So to a certain degree, Frank is actually tracking down these souls for this blues song. It's called The Lowdown Devil Blues that he's trying to compose for the end of the world. And so this is the story I'm working on. That's Bluehand Mojo. And it was really interesting, let me back up a couple. I'm going the wrong way, Ed. Sorry, ah, the noir. The noir is based off of Mamona Guresi's work. She does these beautiful pieces about black figures. But basically she's like a living spirit tree. But the noir is in love with Frank. That's where all his powers come from. And so the idea is that his hand, which he reaches into her to pull his power out, the more he uses his power, the more it creeps up over his body. And so what happens is if he doesn't drink this elixir, he will actually become just a story. And he has to live in the noir forever with her. So he's always trying to fight against that particular piece as well. But this is where all black creativity comes from. It's called the noir as a construction. The spirit trees, of course, are informed by like hoodoo practices and like catching evil spirits and things of that nature. And of course, he's covered with a quilt. And to backtrack, my mother and my grandmother are both quilters. So I actually keep seeing like the quilt popping up in my work. This teal color, haint blue. You guys know what a haint is? For ghost, haint. Hot. But it's like, that's what we call them down south haints. So the story is like this. When you see those houses down south painted with that color, they're tricking the spirits to go into that because they think that it's the sky. And so now it's become like, oh, haint blue. But no, actually, it's like we're trying to protect the house. When I was growing up, most of the houses that we lived in were painted that color. And also had like bridles and like horseshoes, because horses were supposed to be the ward off evil spirits. And it would stop haints from getting into the space, right? It's interesting. I love that kind of stuff, like for like folklore. But I keep seeing how it like permeates a lot of the work that I'm working on right now. Let me see. So Box of Bones is a product I'm working on right now too. It's probably like the largest collaborative project I've ever worked on. Whenever I do my elevator pitch, I call it like Afrocentric Hellraiser. Remember Hellraiser? OK, he's like, yeah. OK, so basically it goes like this. There's this black woman who is a visual culture researcher at Berkeley. This is the character. Her name's Lindsay Ford. She's studying folklore. And she comes across this box that's described in various modes of her research throughout the diaspora that it's a box of revenge or it's a box of pain. Some people call it the shadow box. Some people call it the black box. But most people call it the box of bones. So the stories go throughout the diaspora that if something happens to you or your loved one, your need for revenge or anger calls the box to you. And there are six spirits that live in the box. And the right one will possess you, you exact your revenge, and you owe it something. Sanity, body part, your loved one. Maybe I live in the box for a little bit. So it actually kind of plays around with the idea of the differences between morality and justice and all these different types of really tense story notions. So all these characters are based off of traditional like black stereotypes, like some black brute. That character's called the, oh my God, I forgot the name of the character. Hold on for a second. It's not the burden, the suffering, that's his name, the suffering. That's the dark, that's nobody. As a new body, new, it's the triple I see, right? And that's the burden, which is pretty much like a cotton sack filled with like slave body parts. And it's always replenishing them. So it kind of creeps around. I wanted to make things that like would creep me out, which is hard, because I watch a lot of horror movies. So the other thing is like, I wanted to design characters that if I drew them as shadows, you could see which one was coming to get you, right? I'm working with six different artists, and I'm working with a Yeez-Age and my Everett, who is like an up-and-coming science fiction fantasy writer out of the Bay Area. It's called Box of Bones. We're working on it right now. Probably gonna kick start it, take it to a publisher. He thinks that we could probably get it published by like image comics or something. He's like, image is not gonna publish that damn thing. No one's gonna publish that. We have to publish it ourselves, right? Publish a book about black rage in a box? I don't think so. I don't think so. You can do a Falcon book, not this though. The Night Doctor. The Night Doctor is based off the plague doctors, right? It's about medical apartheid, about the experimentations done, still being done to a certain degree on black bodies throughout history. That's what that character represents. There's some of the pages. I'm gonna probably revisit some of this stuff though. It's too dense. It blinks us to almost the end. Planet Deep South is an offshoot of astro blackness. I like this idea of like the South as kind of like this haunted space or like reclaiming like the black imaginary space. A lot of these people who are dealing with Afrofuturism as a cultural production space are from the South, like Sun Ra, Harry Dumas, Zoriel Hurston, Blow Fly. All those folks are from the South. I like this idea of how using this particular type of ideology, like Dr. King becomes Afrofuturist or Fannie Lou Hamer becomes Afrofuturist or Medgar Evers becomes Afrofuturist because it's about aspiring to get out of a particular space to escape, you know? And so if you look at like the work of like Outkast and now Monet, Ornette Coleman, Henry Dumas, who I think is like the, I would say he's like a patron saint of this idea, the black speculative arts movement because most of his work was published posthumously by his best friend, Eugene Redman. And it was also a co, he also was helped by Toni Morrison. He's a huge influence on Toni Morrison. He died really early. He was in Harlem coming from a Sun Ra concert and he was killed by a cop through mistaken identity. So you see how like these particular things have been happening for a while and intersecting with, you know, black speculative culture, which I think is kind of scary. This is David Banner, who's become like an Afrofuturist kind of social justice agent. He was a rapper, you know? And that leads us to the cyber trap and with the cyber trap. So I was actually invited by Henry Jenkins and some other folk to go and talk about the legacies of cyberpunk. And I love cyberpunk as a space, but I was like, well, how does my work or how does other people work who's working in a space relate to cyberpunk? And he was looking at the black curvy kind of work as relating to it. I was thinking about these notions of like the trap or the cyber trap. Trap music basically is a really grungy, drug infested culture that deals, it's a music genre that's part of hip hop culture. And the early stuff was like T.I., UGK, those particular rappers, early outcasts, deals with like this drug culture. Like today's trap music is very light in comparison to a lot of the early stuff, like Fiomab, Goodymab, those particular rappers. So what happens when you infuse that with cyberpunk culture? So this is a world that I'm building right now that with my friend Regina Bradley and my friend Tim Fielder, there's a future space that has been, it's a dystopian black urban space that deals with like techno drugs and different things of that nature. But really what it is is a way to look at or to kind of telegraph some things that are happening in the South, particularly the black South, because it seems like people aren't really paying attention outside of like the music culture and other things that are happening, right? And it's still romanticized to a certain degree. So my friend Milton Davis just put out this book called Cyber Funk, which is like black cyberpunk. So I would look at that, like this idea as being like a subgenre of that particular kind of construction. So say all that to say is that I've been doing this work trying to escape Mississippi until like a virtual space to try to get the hell out of there. And I ended up back there. So it brings us to here. I'm gonna stop talking and you can reel me with questions. Thank you for your attention. Hope I was riveting. All right. Thank you for bearing with me. It's a lot of like stories. Sorry. And it's hot up here. All right. So what we're gonna do is just cue an A for a while and then I'll wrap it up by 6.30. And then I need to meet with the grad students about their food situation. Okay. That was okay. Questions, comments, liver marks. Go ahead. Just interact with them. Thanks very much. I wanted to ask, I guess, about some about collaboration, which you talked about. You're doing a different project. Also there's definitely this current kind of discussion of some of the differences between industrial production comics, Disney and paper page. And also the way that tasks are divided by role. And that's quite different from selling comics out the back of a truck. Very much so. And from people who are taking a role throughout the whole process. So I guess my question is how does your practice, how does collaboration work for you and how do you help students to engage in these more productive, maybe less industrialized types of ways? Okay. You're right. And I was talking, we were speaking about this earlier where the big two, Marvel and DC, aren't really comic book companies, really. They're more like IP farms, you know? And they just happen to be a leg of these huge multinational companies. One of the things that I think a lot of independent comics, wait, you know what? Let me be more specific. I think a lot of the people who are African-American who are making comics suffer from this notion of nostalgia. As far as like they remember going to the stop and go and getting the comic books every month, you know, that kind of thing. And so they're thinking that that's the kind of thing that they want to do. I want to put out this book every month. Not realizing that, okay, you know what? There's a team of people making those books. There's a huge machine that's pushing those books out, you know, on a consistent basis. And there's a lot of work that goes into that, right? And there's a lot of mastery of particular skill sets, as you were saying, like inkers, writers, that kind of thing. A while ago, I kind of let go of this idea of the lone artour working in the studio. I am a genius and I shall make this thing, right? You know, and the students, I think, particularly undergrad students are still thinking about that notion, you know? So what I try to do is foster collaboration as much as possible, breaking them up into groups, forcing them to work with each other, you know? That kind of thing in various types of spaces. And to show what I'm doing with these types of collaborative efforts, because to me, the story's got to get out. It's all about the story. And so I don't care if I have to share the IP, if I have to do colors on a project, like with the A Box of Bones project, I drew one chapter of it, but I'm not drawing the rest of it. You know, I'm actually just doing the colors, and then my friend Damien's doing inking, and I basically have coerced, you know, successfully six other artists to like, invest their time in this and try to make something happen with it. The economics of it are just staggering, though, because there's this comic book called Brother Man that actually was created in the 1990s, and you can read about it here. A whole family, the Sims family, they created this character that was supposed to, like, advertise an airbrush business, right? Turns out that the comic books were actually more profitable than the airbrush business. They sold by hand 750,000 copies of that book. They had, I know, right? They had 11 issues of it. Then what happened is like, the mother and the father of Dawood's parents died back to back and totally shut down the entire piece. So that would, at his highlight, that was the epitome of, like, collaboration, right? Because the parents were handling some of the business, the brother was doing the writing, Dawood was drawing it, and let's see, and that's obviously Guy Samms was writing it, so you could see some of that cooperative economics happening there, right? I try to foster those spaces through those comic book conventions and through some of the astro-blackness work where people are sitting down with the people that are studying and coming up with different ways to attack those issues, I think. Yeah, I think it probably is a fool's errand, too, to try to make comic books on a monthly basis like that. I'm thinking probably smaller pieces, like bandesign, like 48-page one-shot pieces, or like proof-of-concept pieces, or 60-page books, and put them out like the French do it. Keep your costs low, you know, and do black and white books when you can, you know, which one reasons why I like doing horror because it lends itself to it, that's another reason. And do graphic novels and do anthologies and that kind of thing where you can work with other people to put this stuff out, you know? And keep the quality up and get into those spaces where people can get the product. Because obviously, there's a need for it, but they're not seeing it through the direct market. Because the other thing is that the direct market is a monopoly, right? Which is owned by Diamond Distribution, right? So they have a stranglehold on a direct market. That's how people buy comic books. And it's very difficult to get into that space. Very difficult, so. Did that help? I'm like, okay, yes, sir. Just to pursue the collaboration idea, is this something that seems to work well with this particular medium? Is that an importance in this medium? I mean, a lot of media are necessarily collaborative, but the cost factor here is a little more controllable. Or is it something, you mentioned that Afrofutures, a lot, you named a bunch of folks who were sort of creators in that space and said they're coming from the South. Is this coming from another, like, alternate economy? Well, that's a great question. I have been talking about this earlier. We talked about this cosmic Chitlin circuit idea earlier, right? Like, the Chitlin circuit was a way that black musicians distributed their wares, right? So they would travel to mostly black spaces and they would play at joint, so what have you. And even hip hop started that way. They actually would, because it was just race music right at first before it broke wide. So what I've been trying to do is, what you're saying is I create a network of these alternative cons that actually become a space where people who are producing this type of consumable story can actually make money doing this, right? And so that's part of it, I think. As far as the medium and affordances of the medium, I think that comics definitely are, can be a collaborative medium, but I think that also is because of how they've been traditionally done, too. So if you look at like a lot of really successful independent people like Dave Sim, for instance, who was doing Sarabas Arvark, and he did everything himself. That kind of, pretty much, I think. So a lot of times you see those independent comics that are controlled by one lone person, but you do see some really interesting collaborative things. Sometimes in like the lower tier like independent comics, like I look at like, what's his name? Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, they have some really great collaborative endeavors, like Fatal and like Incognito and a few other things that they've worked on together, but they just really work off of each other. I think the notion is to be open to sharing your ideas and not necessarily being as capitalist-minded, because I really, I don't care about, I do care, my money is awesome, I guess. And it's like, it's not the end-all, be-all to me. I really want to see the stories happen. And I think if you could find people like that, if you're lucky enough to find people like that, and that you can work with, and you're not like overly territorial, that you can actually, in comics, do some really amazing things with it, you know? With the medium. Such, yeah. This is an amazing talk, thank you. Oh, thank you. So, Adrian Marie Brown and Lolli D. Marysha and co-authors in Octavia's Brood, which is amazing, and every room should read it, have a way to go. Yeah. Part of their proposal in Octavia's Brood is to say, to think about how science fiction is essential to community organizing, and to the direction of social movements, because it allows us to envision the possible alternative futures that we want to build. Right. Here at MIT, there's a lot of energy around building technologies and possible futures, but a lot of them are stuck in a technotopian unmarked, and therefore normative, straight, white, wealthy, male imaginary. And I'm wondering how you imagine your own, like, practice and pedagogy. How does it connect with designers and engineers and makers and builders and the kind of critical design theory and practice that you're talking about? What does that look like programmatically? Like, how do you... I'm trying to figure it out a little bit, because I know something we talked about earlier, as far as like the intersections between various modes of study, but thinking about like race as a construction, right? Maybe even race as a diegetic prototype that was really successful. You know what I'm saying? So that kind of idea, because it keeps popping up, and then, but also intersecting with like various types of legibility issues, you know? So I'm thinking about what I've been putting out there as like critical race design studies, you know? Which I didn't necessarily put in the talk, but it's something that I'm kind of like thinking about. The black body as a type of text, various types of like design thinking that engages with critical race theory, like traditional critical race theory, because if you think about it, Derek Bell's work actually started out in speculative work. He's one of the forefathers of critical race theory, right? But he was using, what are you talking about, these story prompts as ways to talk about alternative ways to think about law, right? Because critical race theory comes out of the law profession, right? Derek Bell was a, I think it was at Harvard, right? When he at Harvard? I think he was, yeah, as I recall. And so, you know, ever seen Space Traders, for instance? Space Traders is this story that he made up to talk about property and race, actually. So what happens in Space Traders is like, it's said in the 80s, these aliens come down, right? And they say, hey, we will fix everything on your planet. We'll give you a bajillion dollars. That's a lot of money. Also, we will clean up the entire world, right? We'll fix every problem that you have systemically if you give us all your population with a certain amount of melanin content, right? So, so they had to vote, you know, they had to vote. There was actually like, it's interesting because HBO did this thing called Cosmic Slop, which is based off of the, you know, the Parliament Funkadelic song, right? Where they made this into a series, it was called, well, it wasn't a series. It was supposed to be a pilot by the Huddlin Brothers where they actually did, it was almost like Afrofuturist like Twilight Zone, right? You can actually find pieces of this out on the web. But that Space Traders story is what I'm talking about. Like, when you use narrative and critical thinking about race and then overlap that into these like, you know, these kind of fictional spaces, how do you, what does that look like? You know, yeah, so I'm still working out if this thing is gonna be like a class or special topics course, or is it a new way of thinking about design and critical race theory? I don't know yet. You know, so I'm still thinking about it. But I know it's gonna probably have a huge critical making component and like too huge, but design history, probably media studies, various modes of thinking to kind of like come together and form this kind of idea around how to talk about those things. Cause you're right, issues like the cyber trap, for instance, that could really happen. I mean, the cyber trap could actually happen, you know, down south, it really could. So how do you map those types of like racialized spaces? Cause it's a very racialized space with science fiction and fantasy, you know, and create worlds like that. So I'm still working through it, but I think that, I don't know, I think I'm on the right track, I'm looking forward to devoting some time to it, that's for sure. So, it's a half answer. Yes, sir, Ian. Ian, man, how you doing? So I'm wondering, it's really amazing all the stuff you do, the drawing, the art, the curation, the community building. Is there an analytical component to your work as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Oh, yeah, definitely. Actually, I have a book out right now that I did a co-edited piece called The Black of the Ink that actually just won a book award. I'm like, oh, PCA, ACA for best edited collection. So I do like some analysis as well. There's this really cool collection called What is a Superhero that I talk about, it's called Superhero by Design. Like the semiotics of superheroes. Yeah, so I do like some formal and critical analysis of the work too. Right now, I'm really into the making because honestly, I reach more people. The 10 people that are gonna buy the book that I won this award for, 20 people maybe, that are like my peers. That's not necessarily who I need to speak to. So what I try to do is actually work in a narrative structure because we are made out of stories. Whether you like it or not, we'll just keep editing them over and over again. So a lot of my energy is going that way because I know that I can reach more people. Six thousand people are not gonna buy that book that I just told you about. So that's what my head is right now but I do that kind of work too because I like it. I like talking about ideas and I love that type of engagement. A lot of times it's informing, historically informing the work that I'm making. So, yes, sir. Thank you for this. I just wanted to, I'm curious, comics are so inherently a multi... Yes. Which is one of the reasons I love it. Making a pro to work in Octavia Leather. Yes, yeah. Do you want me to talk to you what the experience was of trying to extract from that? Pros, you know, crossing medium as well as transforming that sort of singular approach to making a story. Yeah, it's... It's so difficult. That's the first thing. So here's the thing. This is like, we're working from our second draft of this thing, like they totally just tore the pieces like this other alternative view of the story that we were trying to put out because first thing was like point of view, right? We're thinking like, okay, well, if people are gonna buy this adaptation, obviously they've already read Kindred, right? No, not so much because here's the thing. The people that actually got us to do that particular job had just stumbled across Octavia Butler, had just found her. This woman, a wonderful editor, Sheila Keenan, she was still at Abrams Comic Arts, that's who's putting it out. She came across her and she's been working and publishing for like 20, 30 years. 20 years, you know? And not heard of this particular, this amazing writer, right? And the president of the company was taking a night class and came across the narrative. So I say all that to say is that we had to readjust our approach and pull out some of the more visceral parts of it. It's very difficult because even in the sketches, the brutality of the story is a very dark narrative. It's not a feel good, anything, you know? And so I find myself trying to, I mean, it's very difficult that when you're talking about like, okay, how do you, what panels do you describe a whipping through? You know, that kind of thing. And I'm like, oh my God, it was like five whippings in the story. So trying to pull out those narratives and actually trying to figure out like spatially how these things are working. And then also using the affordances of comics like diagrammatically, because there's one particular part where like Dana, the main character has like this bag. And so we use cutaways and things that comics do really well diagrammatically to tell the story. So for instance, if things are happening simultaneously on various floors, we have things like that, that comics do really well. I like your comment about like the multimodal nature of comics too, because one of the things I really love about them, you know, is that they can talk about reading in various ways easily, because they kind of a synthesis to a certain degree of image and text, you know. And that's one of the things I always push when I'm talking to teachers, like, okay, well, we're not really taught how to read those types of images early on, unless you're in a program like this, right? And why is that? I'm always leery about that. Like why are people not trained to read images that way early on? Like as kids, you know, that kind of thing. And our comics can be a facilitator for that. So it's been very difficult. I think the process of doing the breakdowns of the pages has been very helpful in pulling out the right images. So what I'm doing right now is I'm drawing the entire book as sketches, right? The entire book, I'm on page 198 right now. It's 240 page book. So what's happening is I'm doing the breakdowns, Damon's gonna do lettering, all that stuff has to be redone, right? But we're still knowing exactly what the framing mechanism is gonna be. There's a whole part of the stories that had to be edited out that we just could not deal with, you know? Cause the book is actually longer than the graphic novel, right? So I think the heart of the story is gonna be there, but it's a very difficult translation. And I'm happy to be doing it, but I don't know if I wanna do that kind of thing. It's a lot of pressure too because it's a beloved book, you know? So hope that answered your question. All right. Yes, sir. You said a few things about your teaching. Could you say a little more about your teaching? I like to make the students uncomfortable. I do, I know, because I don't, I really don't bite my tongue about the political aspects of what design does. And we were talking about this earlier, how like essentially I'm teaching people how to manipulate people, right? I mean, graphic design for the most part is in service of, you know, capitalism and all that good stuff. And I'm giving them the tools to sell things to people. And so I was talking earlier about like creating the first ethics course at University of Illinois. It was called Edge Ethics of the Designer in a Global Economy, who were thinking about from various types of ethical standpoints, okay, so who are you working for? Why are you working for this person? Outside of just paying for your absorbent student loans, how are you gonna keep your sanity? How are you gonna actually keep your humanity and work in this particular industry? Because it eats ideas, like candy, eats them, spits it back out at you. That's what it does really well, you know? And I'm glad I didn't go into like the corporate sector. I've actually seen what happens to someone that goes into the corporate sector like that. I was talking to this gentleman. He was the first African-American to have like a really successful advertising company. And I forgot his name right now. But he has this book called Brainwashed, right? And he talks about the power of images, particularly around like, you know, the black image. And so these types of ideas, I do bring into the classroom and say, okay, look, I'm presenting these things to you, you know? So you'll know, once you're going out there trying to get a job in the image creation industry, because that's what they're doing. You're manipulating images and selling these things to people. So I do make people uncomfortable on purpose because I do believe in a little discomfort when you're talking about learning, you know? Because they're safe, they're safe. It's like, oh, it's gonna be cool. But I try to do things that are more thematic. Like for instance, in my applied semiotics course, I change the theme up from time to time. Like right now the theme, so no, I'm not teaching that course right now. Next year is probably gonna be, I'm gonna call it primary. We're gonna like deal like connotations of primary colors and the students have to create their own products, projects according to the connotations of the colors. You know, that's gonna make them really comfortable because they're so used to like checking off boxes, you know, that doesn't really happen in my classes, actually. It's a lot of like, it's a lot of wrestling with the problem because it's visual, I'm teaching them a methodology of thinking, you know? So it just happens to have a deliverable, but it's a thought process and that's what I'm trying to teach them about. Right now I'm teaching this course called hip hop and visual culture because I do like a lot of teaching around like hip hop and visual thinking. And the idea, I'm just making them all into little CJs, like sampling, remixing things, constantly like mixing up things and putting them out there into the world. You know, that's what we do. And you're constantly, you know, agitated by the stuff that you consume, right? So I try to have like a really serious like media theory, like component to the courses, but it always ends up in a studio course with something that's made. I don't want them to necessarily leave with a portfolio to go get a gig. Honestly, I'd rather that they do other things, but you know, I think that at the end of the day, I want them to be citizens who just happen to be designers, you know? That's what I really want. I want them to be like active citizens who are makers of these things and actually being very conscious about what they're doing ethically with the work that they're making. So, now all my classes are sitting around that idea. Thank you very much. All right.