Just the Beginning: Episode 5
Science Fiction Gets Real
Kickstarter’s Just the Beginning podcast featuring stories about how independent creators bring their ideas to life.
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Meet two creators making work that explores the gap between science fiction and reality.
Shawn Frayne: Inspired by science-fiction movies from the ʼ80s and ʼ90s, Shawn Frayne, the founder of Looking Glass Factory, dreams of making a holograms a part of everyday life.
Kwanza Osajyefo: In his comic BLACK, set in a world where only Black people have superpowers, Kwanza Osajyefo uses science fiction to highlight some important truths about race in America. His follow up, WHITE is currently live on Kickstarter.
Transcript
Zakiya Gibbons: From Kickstarter, this is Just the Beginning.
[Music: Balún — Años Atrás]
In this episode, Science Fiction Gets Real.
ZG: Have you ever had a moment when you realize that we live in the future? You pull out your phone to answer a video call and are like — whoa! this would have seemed like science fiction 20 years ago.
Nick Yulman: And a lot of times the best parts of science fiction stories aren’t the plot twists or flashy spaceships, it’s all the boring stuff—all the things that people in the fictional future consider totally normal. A matter replicator? Of course. How else would you make a cup of coffee?
ZG: And that gap between science fiction and our everyday lives is what we’re going to be hearing about in this episode. The creators we’re about to hear from both use science fiction as a creative tool, but in very different ways.
One, an inventor who is obsessed with holograms, dreams of making the real world a little bit more like science fiction,
Shawn Frayne: I just want it to be as casual to interact with the virtual world as sitting around a campfire or listening to a radio program with your friends.
ZG: And the other, a comics author, is using science fiction to explore the realities of being Black in America.
Kwanza Osajyefo: I admit that I’ve creeped myself out with how I’ve been writing a fiction but then keep having reality sort of validate what I’ve been thinking.
Shawn Frayne and Looking Glass Factory: Chasing the Hologram
A lot of things that are real today started out as science fiction. The submarine was inspired by Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The communicators on Star Trek are among the things that inspired mobile phones.
And while a lot kids who saw Back to the Future II in 1989 left the theater dreaming of hoverboards, flying cars, or time machines, ten-year-old Shawn Frayne was captivated by a different image.
“For me, the obsession started after I saw the shark gobble up Marty,”
[Audio from Back to the Future II]
Marty McFly: The future…
NY: Michael J. Fox’s character, Marty McFly, who‘s just dropped into a sci-fi version of 2015, ducks and screams in terror [scream] as an enormous, holographic shark lunges at him from a billboard advertising Jaws 19.
[Audio from Back to the Future II]
Marty McFly: The shark still looks fake”
NY: From that moment on, Shawn was on a quest. What if the shark didn’t look fake? What if a hologram could feel real? And what if he could be the one to make it?
SF: I got so obsessed with it, my parents got me a book called The Holography Handbook, for Christmas one year. This is this classic book for any hologram nerds out there.
And my dad and I built a little holographic studio in my room. It was right at the foot of my bed in high school. I think it was the only one on the block.
My laser was so low-power, I had to do exposures that were an hour long — so you’re like sitting quietly in the dark, exposing these glass slides. At the end of it, I had a holographic capture. My first one was a little pewter Mickey Mouse. And it was great, but it didn’t move and it wasn’t alive.
NY: And was it something that your friends knew you were into or was it a secret passion?
SF: It wasn’t a secret passion it’s just that nobody cared. [laughs] so I didn’t have that to share most people.
[Music: Datahowler, “Prophet”]
NY: Shawn did find people who shared his obsession when he went to MIT to study physics. He even got to take a course on holography with Stephen Benton, one of the pioneers of the field. And while this was exciting, Shawn was disappointed to learn that the kinds of things he envisioned didn’t exist yet.
SF: I thought somewhere in the labs of MIT there would be this like living, moving holographic display that we were promised in all of these movies. But it just wasn’t there, it didn’t exist, everything was static — basically laser photographs. I realized, unfortunately, that no one had achieved the dream of the hologram.
You know, folks who end up being in the field for 30 or 40 years forget that, yeah, that’s why we got into it. We don’t want to make laser photographs. We want to have the living, three-dimensional world on my desk.
Because there was nothing at the time hidden behind some locked secret door, I just dropped it and I forgot about it for almost ten years
NY: For a lot of us, abandoning a lifelong dream would be devastating. But Shawn is the kind of person who had a backup dream to pursue. He wanted to use technology to protect the environment.
So after college, he started an invention lab to come up with new ways of reducing waste and generating energy more efficiently.
SF: We worked on a lot of stuff in the cleantech field. A little machine that would make solar panels, experimental wind energy systems, and things like that. We made self-inflating bubble wrap (Surprisingly useful!)
NY: But while his attention was focused elsewhere, the world was catching up with Shawn’s dream of tech that could blur the line between the virtual and the real.
Desktop 3D printers were letting people turn digital models in to actual physical objects. And virtual reality headsets like the Oculus rift let people step into computer generated worlds.
When Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014, it suggested that this kind of tech might be ready for a more mainstream audience — you know, beyond teenagers doing physics experiments in their bedrooms.
SF: Oh, people are making 3D stuff for Oculus now, that’s cool, Maybe it’s time for the hologram. That’s when we started Looking Glass Factory about four years ago.
NY: Looking Glass Factory is the company in Brooklyn, New York that Shawn founded along with Alex Hornstein. And with their latest creation, they’ve come pretty close to realizing Sean’s dream of the hologram.
Last summer I got to see a demo of the new holographic display they were about to launch.
SF: Yeah, the challenge of describing a hologram over the radio.
This is the Looking Glass holographic display. It’s about the size of a thick book, like a dictionary. It’s a block of what looks like glass — it’s actually made of lucite. Then four million points of light are projected through that block that generate this three dimensional scene.
SF: So this demo that I’m running right now is a frog, and really feels alive inside the Looking Glass on this table.
NY: It’s almost like you have little terrarium with a frog in it. Can we see something else?
SF: Yeah, so now in the Looking Glass is a monk that’s doing martial arts. We’ve taken volumetric video of this real person and, sort of a way to think of it, pulled from virtual space into the looking glass in real space.
NY: It just looks like we have a little tiny person sitting on the desktop.
SF: And even further, you can bring that content to life. You can interact with this guy.
[Music: Datahowler, “Dazees”]
NY: And those demos just scratch the surface of what’s possible with the Looking glass. They’ve connected spatial sensors to the Looking Glass to allow you intuitively interact with holograms by moving your hands. And maybe most importantly, it’s platform for sharing content. So new things you create could be viewed in looking glasses all over the world.
SF: The goal is to make a system that lets groups of people — without anything on their heads — see and interact with the virtual world. I want it to be as casual to interact with advanced 3D content as sitting around a campfire.
NY: But for Shawn and his team, holograms aren’t just about creating a magical experience. When you step up to the door of their office, you’re greeted with a message:
SF: “No dystopian futures allowed” is scrawled to the door to our office in Greenpoint.
NY: Shawn thinks we’re at something of a crossroads right now. He’s afraid that the current path of virtual reality could lead to a future where we’re all constantly wearing headsets.
SF: Which to me is a very dystopian future. I don’t want that. I don’t want my kids to be only interacting with each other and with things that they’re creating in a headset-only future. So that is the final push that led to us wanting to start a company.”
This won’t be viewed as a socially significant move now, but ten years from now, I think we’ll look back and see that there’s this moment where there was a possible future in which everyone was geared up for 16 hours a day and one or two companies really owned the access to the high-speed ports of your brain, which is your eyes.
NY: If this just sounds like a kind of confusing sci-fi plotline to you, here’s what Shawn is saying: he things virtual 3D content is going to become central to the way we get information. Imagine everything you currently do on your phone or the internet happening in virtual space. And right now, the only way to experience that content is by wearing goggles that are produced by a handful of huge tech companies — remember, Facebook owns one of the main virtual reality platforms, Oculus. So for Shawn, inventing a holographic display goes beyond making a cool gadget. It’s about creating a way to interact with the virtual world that’s just around the corner without having to give Facebook, Google, or Microsoft control over our eyes.
SF: If things go well, that’ll be viewed as a possible but not implemented future because there’ll be things like the Looking Glass.
[Music: Datahowler, “Voltage”]
NY: For Shawn and Alex, virtual reality provided a clear example of what a holographic display shouldn’t be. But the question of what it should be was still wide open.
SF:We didn’t even know if it was possible, but we wanted to show like, if it’s possible, this is what it would look like.
NY: So they did what great inventors have always done — they faked it. Or to be more generous, they started by creating a proof of concept: a basic prototype that lets you experience some aspect of an invention without having to solve all the technical challenges first.
They called these prototypes “volumetric prints.” They look a lot like the holographic displays Shawn imagined — they just couldn’t move yet. When you hold one in your hand, it just looks like a physical object encased in a glass cube: a little person, or Shawn’s go-to demo , a frog.
SF: I would take them to bars and schools and my friends places, I would say, ‘One day, this ink is going to be replaced with millions of points of light and this frog is going to move.’ People imagined their memories captured inside. That was really neat, to see a lot of completely non-technical folks be able to look at the volumetric prints and imagine an entirely different class of technology in a split second.
NY: And from there, they went on to create hundreds of prototypes with varying degrees of success. Shawn recalls an early attempt that was not quite ready for primetime.
SF: This system I was hauling around the West Coast to pitch the folks a few years ago — it was the size of a refrigerator and would generate a little sugar cube-sized volumetric scene of my daughter Jane and my son Ben running around. I thought this thing was amazing. No one else was entertained by that. I actually remember these two guys at Disney literally laughing me out of the room.
NY: These days, their demos at high-profile entertainment companies go pretty differently.
“We just showed this at Pixar a few weeks ago and everyone was really excited about making new content in the Looking Glass. That was a special moment for us. They’re the top 3D creators in the world, and for them to see how their work could live in a new way in this medium was really special.”
Now, almost everybody that sees the Looking Glass, sees the full dream and they can see how, like yeah, this is going to be in homes and schools and hospitals, very, very, very soon.
[Music: Datahowler, “Dazees”]
We have this list actually of one hundred practical things you can do with the Looking Glass. None of us know what’s gonna the strongest first. There are a huge number of applications that are not so distant.
An architect can now have her model live in the Looking Glass. She could present it to a client. Instead of having to make a paper model or a 3D print of that home.
The thing that I’ve always dreamed about is something like holo-Skype: seeing someone in the Looking Glass as if they’re really there. I travel a lot and have a lot of family spread all over the world. That’s the thing that would be most special for me. Eventually. Maybe you’ll be able to have some tactile feedback. So you can see someone in the looking glass — like my daughter Jane running around and I touch her hand and give her a high five and I’ll feel it on my hand.
NY: When Shawn and Alex started working on holographic displays in 2014, they figured it would take ten years to create what they had in mind. The launch of Looking Glass means they’re ahead of schedule from a technical standpoint. But they’re still figuring out how to take holograms from an idea that just sounds like science fiction, to something that people understand and see as a part of everyday life.
SF: You have to have people that create this bubble of belief around this whole team that can be tenuously maintained despite all of the criticism that happens in the chase for something like the hologram, which I think is a lot like the chase for flight — you just don’t know it’s possible
[Music]
Right: Looking Glass Factory’s R&D hardware team in Hong Kong
NY: I originally spoke with Shawn in the summer of 2018 right before Looking Glass launched on Kickstarter. Now it’s out in the hands of thousands of hologram hackers as he calls them. So I recently caught up with him over video chat (a regular non-holographic one) to hear about what people have been doing with it. And what it’s been like for him to see it out in the world.
SF: It’s completely crazy. I mean I’ve worked on this for like fifteen years. There’s never been a community of folks that had a system to make content for and share with each other in holographic form. And not that that exists, all of us on the team are… we’re just in constant shock when we look at twitter in the morning and see what has been created.
There’s this guy, for instance, Bob Burrough, on the west coast, who’s got a piece of Mars living on his desk. There was a 3D scan of a rock on Mars and he downloaded it and pulled it into the Looking Glass, and it’s like it’s there, like sitting on his desk.
I’m thinking of this as tele-archeology, where a robot was able to send something that was almost as good as the atoms of the rock itself and then transport it onto — not only his desk — but then he posted about it on Twitter and a guy in Japan he then, a few minutes later, had that same rock from Mars sitting on his desk in Japan. I don’t know… it’s crazy that this is actually happening, it’s just insane.
NY: And you’ve seen a lot of interesting stuff happening in Japan right?
SF: Sure, I mean, the world’s first Looking Glass club of hundreds of people started in, on its own, in Tokyo. We found out about it a couple of weeks before their first event. And this is just folks who had gotten early access to the Looking Glass through the Kickstarter sharing what they had made. I ended up going, I actually went to their first club meeting. There were dozens of Looking Glasses kicking around this room — and it was amazing. It’s what all of us on the team at Looking Glass factory, over the last five years, have been dreaming and hoping would happen.
[Music]
NY: That’s Shawn Frayne, lifelong hologram nerd and cofounder of Looking Glass Factory. Follow them on Twitter at @LKGGLASS to see some of the amazing thing people have been creating with their holographic displays.
Kwanza Osajyefo: BLACK & WHITE
Zakiya Gibbons: In our last story, we heard how Shawn Frayne drew inspiration from science fiction to create something that he hopes will be part of our future. But for Kwanza Osajyefo, the author of the comic BLACK, science fiction provides a way to tell a story that addresses a contemporary problem with a deep history.
I sat down with Kwanza to talk about how his experience as a black man in the comics industry lead him to create a superhero comic that doesn’t pull punches in its depiction of the racism black people face in America. Camilla Zhang, Kickstarter’s Comics Outreach Lead also joined the conversation.
ZG: Kwanza, I’m so excited you’re here. Okay, I need to admit something. I’ve watched X-Men and I really enjoyed it and stuff, but I wouldn’t consider myself like a comics fan. But after reading BLACK I was like, “Bruh.” (laughter) I love this.
Kwanza Osajyefo: Awesome.
ZG: You wrote a comic called BLACK, just straight-up BLACK. All caps.
Camilla Zhang: Went there.
ZG: Give us a synopsis.
KO: Sure. So the whole premise behind BLACK is what if only Black people had superpowers. And it was an idea that I came up with 13 years ago. You know, you have the lead character in BLACK, Kareem, he gets shot and killed by the police. But then, you know, superhero story, he comes back to life. Finds out he has superpowers, that he’s part of this small percentage of Black people that have had powers for like centuries. But of course it’s kept secret, basically any time a Black person with powers pops up, agents of the United States they pop them back down. And Kareem has to make a choice. And the story’s just like, “Do I want to become like a, you know, rebel revolutionary fighting against like The Man-
ZG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
KO:… or is there another path?” Even though it’s a fantastical story, I’m like, “If Black people had superpowers, how would this, how would this shape up? Like, how would this net out?”
ZG: Yeah.
KO: It’s something that, you know, I felt was very relevant to the Black experience and how something like that could come about.
ZG: ’Cause even though it’s fantastical, it touches on very real issues. Like, the prison industrial complex. It’s talking about, you know, micro aggressions. Different, you know, Black ideologies.
KO: Some people when the first heard the idea, they were like, “Oh, this is so contemporary. This is so of now.” And I’m like, “Uh, no. Black people been getting shot for a long-ass time.”
ZG: Yeah.
KO: “I don’t know where you’ve been.” You know, you mentioned like, you know, the different ideologies. That was something else that was important in writing BLACK as well, is like not having that monolith. Because often when you see Black characters in comic books through the white lens, you know, they’re there to represent like everything about the culture. You know-
ZG: Right.
KO: … they’re there to be the Black person.
BLACK is something that came out of lack of representation in the comic book industry. You know, I grew up reading all of these characters who are these analogies for like the Black experience, like the X-Men. I’m just kind of like, “Why do we need a veneer of like very attractive white people who … in all honesty, Jean Gray, who’s discriminating against you?”
ZG: Uh-huh.
CZ: Yeah.
KO: Nobody’s pulling Wolverine over ’cause he got the nice whip. That’s just not happening.
ZG: (laughs)
KO: And if they did, it’s Wolverine. Let’s not try and d- use metaphor. It’s like, we know how we discriminate in real life.
ZG: Yeah.
CZ: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative).
KO: And so, what if only Black people had superpowers? Oh, you mad?
CZ: (laughs)
ZG: Yeah, exactly.
KO: Why?
ZG: That is totally, that is totally the tone of BLACK. Like, oh, you mad? And it’s just so unapologetic. And … ’cause even with me, I’m unapologetically Black. But even when I read it I was like, “Oh!” You know? Like I wasn’t turned off but I was just, I guess, shocked at how it wasn’t hidden behind a veneer. We’re so used to a veneer and metaphor. And you were like, “Fuck the metaphor, let’s really get into it.”
CZ: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
ZG: Which I appreciated.
KO: As we were working on it, I thought like if we’re really gonna like cut down to the bone, if we’re going to scrape the veneer off of like this kind of story, you know, we need to just be up front-
ZG: Yeah.
KO: … with what it is.
ZG: What was the moment when you first connected with a comic, and what was the moment when you realized that this is what you wanted to do with your life?
KO: I liked comic books from when I was very, very young. Like six or seven. I started out with like the Peanuts and then like Archie and then graduated to like the more advanced stuff. It was something that I found a lot of comfort in. Because when you are kind of like nerdy and bookish and geeky and then all of a sudden there’s like this little like secret enclave that you can go to called the comic book store, you know, where it’s just like there’s nothing but that.
KO: My mom knew what she had on her hands when I was born. It’s like, you know, I was bookish. I was an introvert. I was an only child, so she was just kind of like, “How do I engage this little like super nerd that have I spawned?” You know, when I started drawing my first comic books, like she saved them to the point of embarrassment.
ZG: Aw.
KO: Like, people would come over. I’m like, “No. I’m 20; nobody wants to see that.”
ZG: What was the comic? You need to describe it?
KO: The comic book was about, uh, the planet. So I had anthropomorphized the planet into these little like almost PAC-MAN characters. That’s how into I was when I was a kid.
KO: I think when I decided it was what I wanted to do was a little later, when I finally, you know, paid attention and kind of read the indicia and the credits. And that’s when I realized, it was like this is a job. And so I think it was like probably like in late high school when this, uh, publisher, Milestone Media, emerged. And this was like the first publisher that was doing characters of color as like part of their ethos.
ZG: What era was all … like what year around-?
KO: So I think Milestone came out probably in like ‘93.
ZG: Okay, so we’re talking early ’90s when we’re first starting to see some Black superheros.
KO: Yeah. So prior to that, like most of the comic book characters that anyone are familiar with, it’s not surprise, like they’re mostly white. You can look at every Marvel movie up until Black Panther. So Milestone was like coming out with these characters.
That was the eye opener, and especially because they were characters that looked like me. ’Cause I think like any kid, you’re not paying attention all the time to your fantasy. Like, you identify with the characters that you identify with because they’re cool-
ZG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
CZ: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
KO: … and they can do all this like super stuff.
ZG: Yeah.
KO: And it wasn’t until those characters showed up and I was like, “Wait a minute! There weren’t any brown people.”
ZG: Yes.
KO: “I did not notice that.” Like-
ZG: Uh-huh.
KO: … and then I just became enamored of it. And, um, actually ended up calling in to like Milestone Studios and they interviewed me to … like I mean, this was insane. Like, I picked up the phone and just like, with my little cracked voice, was like, “Hi. I’m the new hotness. I think you guys (laughter) would be really lucky to have me be an artist or a writer,” And they actually let me come in. I was like, “What?”
ZG: Oh, my God!
CZ: How old were you?
KO: So I was maybe 17. And they let me come in and like show my portfolio to their editor-in-chief, who if … this was Dwayne McDuffie, who’s a legend in comic books. Look him up. He had like a huge impact on-
ZG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
KO: … the field.
ZG: Yeah, and he’s an African American man.
KO: Yeah. And, uh, you know, he flipped through my portfolio, looked at some of my ideas. And then, you know, very graciously told me I was not ready for the big leagues. Um, but what was really cool was he asked me like, you know, “What do you want to do in comics? Why do you want to do this?” And basically gave me the green book of navigating the comic book industry. ’Cause he’s like, “Yeah, here’s- here’s how you go about it.” And he’s like, “As you can see, all the brown people are here and not over there-
ZG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
KO: … so let them navigate this as a person of color in a certain way.” It was life-changing. I wouldn’t have a career in comic books at all if it wasn’t for him. Kids needs to see it to be it, you know?
ZG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
KO: And seeing somebody with agency in the industry who looked like me, who came from similar backgrounds, probably had similar experiences, be able to do something as big and game changing as Milestone was just infinitely inspiring.
ZG: So your first job in comics was at Marvel. What was it like going from that place being like, “This is what I want in life,” to actually being there and seeing what it was?
KO: The thing that I noticed there was still that lack of color. And that was something that I realized impacted the content. There were these representations of like African Americans women, queer folk, like that just were off because they were coming from this very limited perspective. It’s like, “Oh, is that how your one Black friend talks?” Also not having anyone in the room who could challenge that was one of the big key things.
When you’re kind of mired and entrenched in this one way of doing things for like so long, you do get blinders. I mean, obviously there’s, you know, biases and prejudices and stuff out there. But what I really realize is like, Oh, it’s just ’cause we’re not here. So how do we get in here-
ZG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
CZ: Yeah, yeah.
KO: … in order to change these perspectives? Because that’s what you actually need.
CZ: I had a similar track to you. Like, instead of an internship at Marvel, I did an internship at DC. Only girl in the room. Also only junior in the room. And won’t name names, but legit an editor called another artist a pussy.
ZG: So it’s safe to say the comics industry is like super white, super male-dominated — probably super straight.
CZ: Yeah.
KO: Yeah.
KO: Yeah. But I think, I think it’s been changing, you know, quite a bit in I’d probably say like the last five years.Like, I was so happy recently with like Spider Man that they finally gave that boy like a decent fade.
ZG: Yes!
KO: Who has been drawing this boy’s hair?
ZG: Yes.
KO: Like, little things like that are important to represent-
ZG: Yeah.
KO: … culture accurately. And it seems superficial, but it’s not.
ZG: I want to hear more about your upbringing.
KO: I grew up around like nothing but strong, Southern women. Like, my family’s like from North Carolina.
ZG: I could tell in the way you wrote the characters, especially the older Black woman character in BLACK. So like, I’m Black. I’m Southern. Half my family’s from like Arkansas. And so I was like, “This is so spot on.”
KO: The fact that it resonated with you is like a real and tangible part of your experience is exactly what I wanted to put into comics that were about Black people.
ZG: Yeah.
KO: Because those things are what’s missing.
ZG: It seems like BLACK resonated with a lot of people, because the Kickstarter campaign was so successful.
KO: I didn’t know that it would resonate with people the way that it did. And we ended up with like over $90,000 dollars at the end of the campaign-
ZG: Wow.
KO: … and it was really validating-
ZG: Yeah.
KO: … because that’s the point of it. You know, it’s something that had I brought to a publisher, they probably would’ve like hemmed and hawed or like not really gotten it-
ZG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
KO: … and so like, “Why would we do that?”
CZ: They might’ve just said no flat out.
ZG: It’s like people being like, “Oh, there’s no money in that.” But once you actually have the opportunity to put out a POC-centered story, so many people come flocking.
ZG: So, BLACK is being turned into a movie.
KO: Yeah, it was really crazy. So we got a movie offer the day that we launched the Kickstarter.
ZG: So everyone was sliding in your DMs?
KO: My DMs that week … so, when we launched it, I did not have a manager. I did not have a lawyer. We did not have a publisher. And I got all of that in a week.
I had that worry that we’d wind up at a major studio and that they wouldn’t get it. We ended up at Studio 8. I’ve read like a few scripts and they’ve all made me completely jealous. I like my book, but like the stuff that I’ve read has made me want to like set that on fire and rewrite it.
ZG: Really?
KO: Just ’cause, you know, when have other people kind of like take your ideas and like rework them and-
ZG: What has that been like?
KO: It’s- it’s been, it’s been really cool, because like I’m not kidding. I’ve thought like, “Can I make like a super cut of my own book, where like I go back and rewrite BLACK but like a whole ‘nother version?”
ZG: Yeah.
CZ: (laughs)
KO: ’Cause like there’s so many things in hindsight I would revisit. Hindsight, like I could’ve put so many more women in this story, and I just didn’t. And I didn’t because I’m a dude.
ZG: I was going to say, it’s going back to what we were talking about. It’s not even always mal intent; you just need more people in the room of different-
KO: Yeah.
ZG: … experiences to write the thing, to represent the experience.
CZ: I don’t know how much we can talk about like your overall plan for this trilogy?
KO: Yeah. So I mean, WHITE is the second part of the trilogy. And it’s, you know, it’s set three years later after the events in BLACK. Spoiler, you should’ve gotten the book … I’m gonna tell you what happens at the end of BLACK. Like, the world does find out that only Black people have superpowers. And, understandably, start tripping. WHITE kind of expands that into the context of like, all right, well we asked you what if only Black people had superpowers. So now the question is, how would America react-
ZG: Yeah.
KO: … if only Black people had superpowers? Because it- it’s, it’s very much a culture that is entrenched and founded in racism.
CZ: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
KO: People don’t want to acknowledge that, but that’s very much the foundation of this country. It was founded in slavery. We’re writing a fiction, but it’s a fiction that’s definitely related to reality. And the reality is that, you know, we live in a country that’s struggling-
CZ: Yeah.
KO: … you know, with like culture and with its history and with like the reality of like who we are. And part of the reason that I, you know, called the second book WHITE is because I really wanted to address that context.
ZG: So there’s the main character in WHITE named Theodore Mann. Tell me more about him.
KO: So Theodore Mann, uh, is basically like the patriarch of the- of the Mann family that has founded its entire family’s stock on exploiting empowered Black people. So they’ve known about this like pretty much the entire history of it-
ZG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
KO: … and have actively like worked to keep it a secret. They’ve worked with like the U.S. government to sort of like not only exploit empowered Blacks but, you know, just keep it off the public radar for profit and gain but also, you know, for social order. Theodore Mann has now become President of the United States.
ZG: Wait, Theodore Mann becomes the president and this is in WHITE?
KO: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
ZG: … Wait! This is how I react when I find out like who was eliminated on RuPaul’s Drag Race.
KO: (laughs) Believe it or not, despite current events, it was always my intention. I admit that I’ve creeped myself out with how I’ve been telling the story in a way that I felt like has just reflected history.
ZG: Right.
KO: Uh, you know, in the Black experience and like, you know, a little bit of like fictional like imagineering and stuff like that. But then keep having reality sort of like validate what I’m thinking.
ZG:So like in WHITE, cat’s out of the bag. We all know that Black people have superpowers. People are flipping the fuck out. How are people going to move on from this? It’s all about confronting whiteness and Blackness and this discomfort that you’re talking about. And when you dropped BLACK, kind of similar things happened where people were really uncomfortable. People were angry. People were freaking out.
KO: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
ZG: People were calling you a racist.
KO: People coming out and saying like, “Oh, well, you’re racist because this, this comic book isn’t diverse.” I was like, “This comic book is called BLACK. And the premise is what if only Black people had superpowers.” And it’s like, “Yeah, but that’s what makes it racist.”
Dude, Grant Morrison’s 2000 run of Justice League had no Black people in it. You were comfortable. But the minute I poke a hole in that and say, “What if only Black people have super powers?” you’re just like, “uuuuuuuuughhhhh…”
It’s really funny that like having superpowers suddenly makes you question social constructs.
[Music: SassyBlack “Discovery of Self”]
KO: A couple years ago when we had first launched a book, this young man, he had come over and he was showing me and my co-creator Tim his portfolio of artwork. And he was like, “I didn’t know that I wasn’t present in comic books until I saw your book.” And that was exactly the same feeling that I had in Milestone. And like to have someone say the exact same thing that I felt back then to me, that’s, you know, part of why I do this. Because it was, again, important for me to create these narratives that reflect this experience, this culture, this perspective. I just want to create this playground for everyone to tell these stories and make some people uncomfortable or make them happy — both.
ZG: That was comics writer Kwanza Osajyefo speaking with Camilla Zhang, Kickstarter’s comics outreach lead, and with me. His campaign for the second book in the trilogy, WHITE, will be live on Kickstarter until March 31, 2019.
Credits
NY: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Just the Beginning. the. Show is produced by Zakiya Gibbons, Michael Garofalo and me Nick Yulman. Elyse Mallouk is Kickstarter’s Editorial Director.
ZG: Visit us at podcast.kickstarter.com .And tell us what you think of the show — leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts
NY: Our theme music is by Balún. And the music you’re hearing now is the new single for SassyBlack called “Discovery of Self.” Find both artists on Bandcamp.
ZG: Until next time, I’m Zakiya Gibbons
NY: I’m Nick Yulman. And this is just the beginning
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