Why can’t the brothers at the comic book and zine conventions get a little media love? We’ve got the NFL Network, the NBA Network, the Summer Olympics, Baseball Season, the evening news, and reality television shows. But where’s the Black dungeon masters network? If we have the Summer Olympics, then why not the Black cosplayers Olympics? Baseball season? How about comic book convention season? And if you think reality shows like Cops and Love and Hip Hop are entertaining, then you’ll love the drama that unfolds among the hardcore fans who camp out all night at Comic-Con, just to get into Big Bang Theory panel.
Until programming like this becomes a little more commonplace, I hope these portraits from the 2014 comic convention season will help fill the gap.
Alternative Press Expo attendee, Fort Mason, San Francisco, California.
I’m a little backlogged on drawings, and this represents my continuing effort to catch up. I still have another drawing or two from October’s Alternative Press Expo, but I have also continued to create current drawings, most of which I’ve already posted here.
This guy caught my attention because of his facial symmetry, his amazing cheekbones, his impressively full and well-groomed beard, and his unusual height and muscularity. This Alternative Press Expo shopper was, from the looks of the items in his hands, really interested in indie super hero zines and comics. He must have had about 20 different publications in his clear plastic backpack.
The aspect of nerd culture that I love most is its contradiction, and this guy was a perfect example. He had the body of an athlete and, in fact, he did play Division III football in college; but he had the passions of a geek, the focus of a nerd, and (truth be told) the social awkwardness of a total dork.
Movies like Revenge of the Nerds, aside, nerd/geek/dork culture doesn’t have a single specific look. It’s more a feeling that’s mapped out in the subtleties of body movement, facial express, and the places where we gather. Those of us who are real, true nerds/geeks/dorks can recognize our brethren and sistren when we see them. Outsiders are distracted by things like beauty, fashion, athleticism, and physical size. True insiders know that, just as nerdiness and geekiness and dorkiness have no color, they also have no sexual orientation, no gender, no body type, and no single style or fashion aesthetic. We are everywhere, and we do everything. Nerds, geeks, and dorks cannot be placed in a box. We are bigger, broader, and more diverse than our collective stereotypes. We are everything you’d expect we are and nothing you could imagine. (But almost all of us love Star Trek, so that stereotype is kind of correct.)
An Alternative Press Expo attendee, Fort Mason, San Francisco, California.
There are many ways of wearing dreadlocks. This brother prefers the free and easy, low-maintenance way. Hi locks are each a different thickness, and they’re fuzzy at the roots; but the effect is fiercely, fabulously, and unapologetically Black.
I loved being a child. At the time, I wouldn’t have put it into quite those words. I just knew I was happy. Whenever I’m around my nieces, or whenever I see happy children around the city, it reminds me of some of the things that are so wonderful about being a kid.
This little boy, sitting on his father’s shoulders, is a perfect example. He’s not worried about falling off, because he has that wonderful feeling of perfect safety and protection to which only children have access. Looking back, it’s one of the things that I cherish most about my own childhood. I never felt unsafe, because my dad and my mom created a wonderfully protected space for my me and my brother. It was the perfect place in which to grow and explore the world around us. We had just enough freedom to challenge ourselves, and just enough restrictions to keep us from encountering anything that bigger than a pair of happy-go-lucky, bookish kids could handle.
Of course, I was well into graduate school before I realized that having the time to grow up at my own pace was a gift. It was then that I finally began to appreciate the work and the intentionality that my parents brought to the task of raising children–I think that realization marked the moment when I became a real adult. It was also the moment when I began to understand the true meaning of unearned privilege.
One day, the kid in this drawing will have the same realization, and his dad will be able to feel proud that he raised an African American man who takes nothing for granted.
This man wasn’t really sitting on a large red box. He was actually sitting on the steps of a house in the Maxwell Park section of Oakland. It’s a house at a corner where the 47 bus stops on it’s way through the neighborhood. People use the steps as informal bus stop seating. You can tell by this man’s short sleeves that I did this drawing a few days ago, before today’s icy cold rain storm.
I liked this guy. He was the only person in Trader Joe’s without a grocery cart or hand basket. He’d folded his arms like he was cold; or maybe he was just a little freaked out by the number of people in the store and the length of the lines at check out. I think he was waiting for someone else to finish shopping.
In terms of his outfit, this guy was doing a neat sort of dress casual thing, with a pair of fancy dark denim jeans, a cashmere sweater, and a Montana Silversmiths belt buckle (don’t ask me how I know that). It thought he might work in sports or television or some other field in which style and prestige are important but suits are not required. Clean shaven of head and face–except for a little line of a goatee–he didn’t really have a baby face, but his look was unquestionably boyish. He looked like the kind of guy who would be friendly and good-humored. He might have been the class clown back in high school or the beer captain of his college rugby team.
In short, he looked like the kind of guy I’d enjoy getting to know. In a different context, though, a police officer would probably think he looked dangerous or predatory or homicidal. Because he is a man and he is Black, the subject of this drawing probably seems frightening to many, simply because of his skin and his hair and his attitude.
In the wake of the Ferguson protests or the subsequent #BlackLivesMatter protests on television, many Americans of all races have come to believe that the fear of Black men simply because they are Black is irrational.
But irrational fears are phobias; and don’t most phobias have labels and diagnostic criteria? If the fear of Black men was truly believed to be irrational, pathological, and unfounded, wouldn’t it be identified as an illness?
But it isn’t, and individual voices throughout our society fall all over themselves to justify the fear of men of African descent as not only acceptable, but necessary. Make no mistake: the fear of Black men is an illness; and yet the power to define what is normal and healthy, on the one hand, and what is pathological, on the other, belongs to the group(s) in power. There is nothing empirical and little that is scientific about the designation of some behaviors or attitudes as irrational and others as reasonable. Until our understanding of what is reasonable is no longer defined as all behaviors that are in the best interest of the majority, those whose existence (and resistance) makes the majority feel uncomfortable will have no recourse against the fear and hatred that so many Americans feel toward them.
The psychological defense mechanism called projection – when one accuses someone of having traits they refuse to acknowledge in themselves – may also explain why white people fear violence from Black people. Instead of acknowledging the past and present forms of violence Black people have suffered at the hands of whites, it is projected onto the victims themselves.
Mi Pueblo Grocery Store, High Street, Oakland, California.
Decades of research have demonstrated that a mere subliminal flash of a black man’s face can make us fear the worst — to evaluate ambiguous behavior as aggressive, to miscategorize harmless objects as weapons, to shoot quickly and to inappropriately dispatch a perceived threat.
In video game experiments requiring split-second judgments, subjects — no matter their race, age or attitudes — are quicker to fire at an armed black man than at a white man carrying a gun, and more likely to shoot unarmed blacks than unarmed whites.
That raises criminal justice issues that won’t be resolved by body cameras. It’s a problem centuries in the making, and belongs to all of us.
Alternative Press Expo Attendee, Fort Mason, San Francisco, California.
Everybody would say “of course all lives matter”. Our philosophical, religious and moral sensibilities would all say that, but in fact, many people don’t matter. When we say “black lives matter”, it’s a hashtag. It’s a movement. Die-ins are happening all over the country, protest movements around that phrase “black lives matter” because young black men haven’t mattered in the country and the criminal justice system has treated them very differently than my young white sons.
