I recently reread Jeff Smith's Bone with my girlfriend, and it strikes me that this is a comic that I've used time and again to get non-comics readers to read comics. While reading it, I had a lot of thoughts, namely about the nature of world-building, the idea that characters need to have story arcs, the influence of Carl Barks, and a whole host of other stuff. I was gonna write articles about them, but you know what? I decided to go one better. I reached out to Cartoon Books, and with the help of their Production Manager Kathleen Glosan, was able to get some answers straight from the man himself, Jeff Smith.
Spoilers for Bone are up ahead, so if you've never read it, stop reading this now and go buy yourself a copy, and then come back.
Q&A with Jeff Smith
by Duy
DUY TANO: Who do you consider the actual protagonist of Bone? Fone Bone is the ostensible main character, but Thorn is the one who goes through this big heroic arc, while Phoney drives a massive portion of the plot.
JEFF SMITH: Fone Bone and Thorn share the role of protagonist, I think. You are right that Thorn is the one who goes on the classic hero’s journey, but Fone Bone and his cousins are still the stars of the book. It’s like the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera. There the “story” is really about two young star-crossed performers in the opera that are thwarted by the powerful elite that run the show, but everybody knows it’s the Marx Brothers who help them succeed that are the real stars!
From the very beginning, the Bone cousins were fully formed.
Bone is notable in 2018 I think because it shows three very strong women: Thorn, Gran'ma Ben, and Briar. It must have been notable in the early 90s as well because these very strong women are presented as full characters and not oversexed secondary characters. This is something I think has led Bone to age very well. May I ask if you have any insight on the readership of Bone, and if perhaps the gender breakdown is more even than with other comic books?
In the early days, my readership was mostly all male because that’s who bought and read comic books. Over the course of the work, the readers changed. First women and then children started showing up at book signings, and to this day I have a pretty even mix of males and females, adults and kids.
I am not aware of the gender breakdown on other books. Certainly, the range of subjects and the influx of female creators and readers has exploded since the days when Bone started, and in general the community of comics is more reflective of real life. That has really upped the quality of our art form and makes me happy.
Does a character really need to have a growth arc? Phoney Bone is the same greedy character he is from beginning to end. There is a bit of a development in him refusing to leave his cousins at the end, but he still tries to steal the Harvestar treasure and is regretful when that doesn't push through.
He’s a stinker, isn’t he? It goes back to my Marx Bros. comparison. Like the Bone cousins, the Marx’s are cartoon characters, but the world doesn’t seem to notice. They exist outside the rules. The rest of the cast and the story advance only with their help. In Bone, Thorn, Gran’ma and even Lucius, along with almost all the rest of the characters had real arcs. Some were life changing. The cousins needed to show a little growth, but only just enough.
The ability to lead the audience into believing that a story is about one thing (humor, slapstick) while then slowly leading them into another genre altogether is something I've seen mostly with the Simpsons and Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics. How did you manage to balance out so many conflicting tones, spiraling from epic fantasy to humorous slapstick? This is a world where some people have read Moby Dick and have copyrights on ice cream and pastries, but where dragons exist in valleys where no one has heard of any of those things. And none of it feels wrong, or out of place. How did you manage that balancing act?
The trick was to keep the story and humor going so fast that folks wouldn’t stop and ask questions. I had rules that I followed but tried to keep them as invisible as possible. I’ll give you one example: whenever Fone Bone and Thorn would talk to animals, like Miz Possum or Ted, it always took place at the farm, far away from the town and humans. That kept the world of Aesop’s fables separate from the more frontier-like setting of the tavern.
If you had to name just three things that you took from Carl Barks (another creator I talk about a lot on the Cube), what would they be? Are there specific Barks stories that have stuck with you?
From a Carl Barks Donald Duck story in the Golden Age. Coincidence?
Three things. Ok. One: The sense of adventure and imagination. The Ducks roamed the earth, visiting distant cultures real and made up. And always on a ridiculous but awesome premise. Two: Pacing. Barks knew how to move a story and make it alive. He knew when to skip around and speed up the pacing or when to slow down and spend time with the characters. Three: The art. I loved the line art! I loved the simple cartoony characters shown against a hyper detailed and realistic background.
There are certain things in Bone that feel to me like Jeff improvised in the middle. I'm thinking mainly of the reveal that Briar was the Hooded One, when prior to it, it seemed that the Hooded One was male, and also that the traitor was originally a nursemaid. But I'm also thinking of Rock Jaw, and how at the very end, he did nothing, despite the build-up going in that direction. How much of Bone was planned out, and how much of it was improvised? How important is flexibility when running a serialized story?
There absolutely was improvisation during the writing of Bone. Things would come up, I’d get new ideas, but I always attempted to steer the story toward the ending that I’d settled on. However, the reveal of Briar as the Hooded One was not one of those things. Ten years earlier, during my first bash at Bone in a college newspaper strip called Thorn, I revealed to a stunned Fone Bone and Thorn that the Hooded One was Gran’ma Ben’s evil twin sister! The fact the rat creatures didn’t know she was a woman and assumed the Hooded One was male (fooled by the whispery word balloons) was an intentional misdirect.
How do you think your background as an animator affect the way Bone reads? Personally, I find that most of your contemporaries had a type of staggered pacing, as if they read a bunch of Peanuts strips and mimicked that type of pacing, but Bone flows completely differently, and more smoothly. Animation definitely played a role. But even before that, back when I was a teenager looking at comics by Carl Barks and Will Eisner, I thought there was a way to combine those styles and create a more seamless, complete flow.
Thorn Harvestar, Princess of Atheia
Jeff has said that he didn't create Bone for children; he did it for himself, and that children back then were likely not to be reached by comic shops. Given that he managed to create what I would argue is the go-to all-ages comics recommendation, how would he propose that the comics medium and industry reach a wider audience, and what is the comic shop's place in it?
Well, the thing I latched onto was graphic novels. The format allows for a more durable product and promotes the idea of restocking books for new customers. The relative newness of the form also invites new ideas, new topics and genres, as well as new distribution possibilities, like libraries, bookstores and on-line stores. A wide selection of genres is key. As for comic shops, they started this movement. Most shops have graphic novel and Indy sections, and most are very welcoming to the general public. Women and children have dollars, too!
A little under ten years ago, I was in a bookstore and an eight-by-eight-inch comic with lush orange colors called Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 caught my eye. I bought it and the detailed, classically illustrated artwork as well as the story it told blew my mind. In a world where animals are all intelligent, mice have to adapt in order to survive. The Mouse Guard protects them.
Mouse Guard's world-building is so intricate and developed and I wanted to know how much thought went into it even prior to pencil being put to paper, other aspects of the craft, and future plans, including the long awaited Weasel War of 1149. So without further ado, here's David Petersen.
An Interview with Mouse Guard's David Petersen
Duy: Why did you pick talking animals in the first place for Mouse Guard? Did they come before the fantasy setting, or did you always know you were going to use mice?
David Petersen: No, I didn’t always know I was going to use mice. Mouse Guard grew out of a high school idea that I had, where I wanted to do a talking animal story with a medieval setting. And it was originally called 1149, for the year, but that’s all it was called. It wasn’t such-and-such Guard 1149; it was just 1149. And it had lots of different kinds of animals. It had a fox, a bear, a ferret, a tiger, a rabbit, a duck — what it didn’t have were mice. So it was about me wanting to do a Wind in the Willows, Disney’s Robin Hood, that kind of thing, set in a medieval time like a Dungeons and Dragons adventure. It wasn’t until college that I dusted the idea off again, made some changes, and that’s when the mice came in.
It sounds like the mice came pretty late in the game. The world of Mouse Guard is so fully defined to me, in terms of geography, jobs, politics, the whole thing. How much of it did you actually have worked out before you even started page 1 of Fall 1152?
The mice came late, but when the mice came in, it’s almost like it became a new project, because all the other stuff went away. When I made the switch, it’s also when I decided that instead of talking animals with human proportions — like the characters from Disney’s Robin Hood, where they’re very much standing upright but they just kind of have an animal head, some fur, and a tail, but otherwise they’re human in stature — that’s what 1149 was.
When the mice came in, that’s when I decided to make it more like Aesop’s Fables, where the animals are actually animals, and all the predator and prey relationships would be there. That’s when I realized that mice are so vulnerable that they would have to have some special attention paid to them, so I can develop a culture where it’s believable that they could exist in this world. And that just took over, and everything else kinda went away.
From that point, the idea that there were these ranger mice that patrolled – very quickly, three characters came out of that: Saxon, Kenzie, and Rand. Saxon being the offensive, Kenzie being the brains of the outfit, and Rand being the defensive mouse, so the three would act as one. I first drew those mice in 1996, and I didn’t write and draw the first issue of Mouse Guard until 2004, so there was a lot of time there for me to let ideas develop. I wasn’t actively working on Mouse Guard. It reminds me of how the filmmakers for Lord of the Rings were talking about how they were building Hobbiton the first time, for Fellowship of the Ring. They went out there and they dug into some hillside and put everything in, and then they left it. They abandoned it for like a year and then let everything go to seed. So when they came back, it looked like it had always been there.
And that’s kinda how I think about it. I’d built some structure: Saxon, Kenzie, Rand, the idea of what the Guard is, et cetera. And then I just let it go to seed in my mind before it was time to actually do the comic. And a lot of the other world-building stuff you’re talking about, like cities, relationships between towns, or things like that, or if I was gonna focus on weavers or carpenters or things like that, that just came organically out of working on the series.
So you’ve mentioned Lord of the Rings and Disney’s Robin Hood, and we know you come from printmaking, so were you influenced mostly by comics, or did you always have ambitions beyond comics? We know Mouse Guard has been optioned for a film.
I’m influenced by all sorts of things. I grew up reading a lot of comics. I was definitely influenced by Eastman and Laird’s run on Ninja Turtles. I was influenced by Dave Cockrum/John Byrne era of X-Men, I was influenced by the Jim Lee run on X-Men. I was a Wildstorm kid. Hellboy was a huge thing that kind of changed my life about understanding what comics could be. But I’m equally influenced artistically by classic Golden Age illustrators, like NC Wyeth, John Tenniel, EH Shepard, and Edmund Dulac.
I really like how your style looks so different that’s out on the shelves. That was really one of the things that drew my attention to it. This is way back in 2010, this hardcover 8x8 book. Archaia’s got such a good track record for production. What made you pick those dimensions, 8x8?
Thank you. So way before I started Mouse Guard, there was another person who had gone to Eastern Michigan University, where I went to college. She was a couple of years older than me. When she graduated, she had done some comics work professionally – her own self-published work. And I thought that was really impressive, so I talked with her a little bit about that. She gave me some advice about how, if you’re thinking of writing and drawing your own comic, don’t pay to have it published. Do a mini-comic, do a zine. I know it doesn’t feel like you’re doing much when you’re doing the zine, but trust me. Because you’ll learn all of your storytelling mistakes when you see them in print. So don’t cut your teeth on how to do this craft by paying for expensive printing. Pay for cheap photocopy print.
So with that in mind, I was like, if I go to my local convention to try to sell a zine or a minicomic, everybody in that convention at that time – this was the late 90s or early 2000s – everybody there was doing minicomics. It was the thing. I thought, I’m not gonna have any kind of big backdrop or banner if I go to a convention, nobody knows my name, so why would someone walking down the middle of the aisle at a convention come to my table to look at my little white rectangle? ‘Cause I’m not gonna be able to see the artwork from a distance without some kind of a backdrop. Why would they come to look at my little white rectangle instead of somebody else’s little white rectangle?
So I started thinking of ways to try to set a book apart without changing production costs. And you know, a minicomic is an 8-and-a-half-by-11 sheet of paper folded in half. And I realized if I took legal paper and folded that, you get something that’s a little bit wider. And I liked it, I liked what it did. I played around with it a little, I figured out what it would do with panel dimensions. I thought it was really interesting and would set the book apart. So by the time I got around to doing the first issue of Mouse Guard, print on demand had become a thing. That didn’t exist before, but it was suddenly a thing, and the print-on-demand company that I had some familiarity with said, “Custom sizes, no extra charge.” And I said, ooh! I know what I’ll do. I’ll make it the other format. That way, when I do landscape images, like establishing shots of nature and stuff, they won’t just be a sliver on a page. Because when you do a really thin horizontal piece on a traditional comic page, they’re very thin, they’re very small. They have very little impact. But if I do it this way, I’d be able to use a third of a page for one of those kinds of panels, and it’ll have some real meaning. And I decided to make it the same dimension across as tall, so when I had to do any math for the reduction, because you do comics larger than printed, I only had to do that math once, because it was going to be the same across as it was tall.
So I did the 8x8, and then when I showed the self-published issue to Archaia, Mark Smylie, who was head of Archaia – let’s be honest, there were two people at Archaia, Mark Smylie and his business partner, when I showed it to him – but when I showed it to Mark, he asked, “Do you want to keep it in this format?” And I thought, “This is where this conversation is going to end. He’s not going to want to publish a square book.” And I said, “Yeah, I would want to keep it in this format,” and he nodded, “That’s the right answer.”
You were expecting that he wanted you to say, “No, we can do whatever format you want.”
Yeah yeah. I mean, sure, I’d be open to changing it to publish it, but he apparently liked the proportions and he liked that I was someone who would stick to my guns, I guess, and not be afraid to say that to a publisher. I guess, I’m speculating. I don’t really know what he liked about that answer, but he did like that answer.
You’re known for creating models in order to work out the geography and architecture of your setting. Is this something you’d recommend to other artists? And why do you think we don’t see this type of thing quite often?
I think we don’t see it because of the time. I think there are either comic book artists who are inherently good at it, or they draw comics where it’s just not as important, either because of the style of the artwork or because the backgrounds are abbreviated, or it just doesn’t read the same way, like if you’re talking about a monthly superhero book. They also a lot of the time don’t really have to create new locations, other than, this is an office, this is a warehouse, this is a whatever. Sometimes they do, but it’s based on very real-world modern architecture. So they can use a lot of photo reference, they can use Google Sketchup, or they can just easily draw it in perspective, because they’re good at that.
I’m not as good as that, and I don’t like fiddling around. I find that I work really well with my hands, and I actually design better in 3D than I do in 2D when it comes to things like that. So I can quickly sketch up a room by quick-gluing sticks and cardboard together, and have a 3D representation of all the proportions. How tall vs. wide, what the curve of this arch is, or how thick the columns are compared to the doorway… all these kinds of spatial relationships, I can do better by designing it in 3D than I can in 2D. And like I said, I work with my hands better, so instead of using a computer-aided model, I like doing it practically. But it does take time, and not everybody has the luxury of taking that much time when they’re working on a book.
I would encourage people to think about space and think about architecture in their books. I think it’s really easy to make simple models just by taking a shoebox and you can put in doll furniture, Lego people…
Action figures.
Yeah, things like that, as long as they’re in scale with one another. Even if you don’t use it for the perspective, just use it as a visualization technique, almost like previz in a movie. You can suddenly realize, if you use the camera on your phone or use a digital camera or whatever, you can get in there and figure out, oh, this angle works really well for telling this moment in the story. Or if I want to do this kind of overhead shot, it works better in a horizontal panel, or it works better in a vertical panel. I think it’s a really easy way to move your eyes in a scene where you don’t have to do hundreds of thumbnails. But it’s not like some necessary thing or everyone should do it or whatever. But I think being aware of a sense of space is important, and coming up with good design is important, and if you struggle with that, you might consider doing some model work. I find it really rewarding.
"I can’t think of anything that I’d be more excited about to work on as a long-term project than Mouse Guard."
It’s interesting to me because the only other artist I know who regularly does any model work is Chris Ware, and your styles couldn’t be any more different.
Gabe Rodriguez who did Locke & Key has some Google Sketchup models of Keyhouse from Locke &Key. And I know some people who have used them once, like Jeremy Bastian has done two models, total, for Cursed Pirate Girl. But his are very rudimentary – he made one out of Lego, but he made it out of big chunky blocks, not even the thin pieces to get subtlety. He just wanted to kind of mass up this structure and say, “There, that now makes sense for the size.” The colors were all different. It looked cobbled together, like you went to a Lego Store and just took whatever bricks were on the table. But that’s all he needed. That’s how good Jeremy is, because he just needed that. James Gurney – he’s not a comic book illustrator – he’s done models. He’s more doing models for lighting reference because he’s doing oil paintings with very realistic and very specific lighting requirements to see how light bounces, where shadows fall, and things like that. He’s another person who builds his own models of things for reference.
Your world-building is so intense that you’ve even created songs. “The Ballad of the Ivory Lass” was on loop in my playlist for a while because I think it’s so good. Do you have help creating these tracks? Is that actually you on the record?
No, it’s not me singing; it’s a friend of mine who the character of Kenzie is based on. Kenzie actually sings that in Winter 1152, and my friend Jesse, who Kenzie is based on, has done a lot of musical theater. So I said, hey, I have this ballad, but I might need some help though. And he actually had the melody for, not necessarily for “The Ballad of the Ivory Lass,” but he said, “Hey, I’ve got a melody I’ve been toying with.” And I think I changed a few notes, but yeah, I wrote all the lyrics to that. I think I recorded a version just to tell him where I changed the notes a little, like this is gonna go up instead of down, at the end of this phrase. And then he and I worked together to get a recording of it. I was more like his audio engineer. I don’t perform on it at all. I was the one who suggested using the recorder that was at the beginning, the whistle-flute sound at the beginning of that track. But no, that’s all his performance. I wrote the lyrics.
There’s a couple of other songs. There’s the funeral ballad in Winter, and I said, hey, let’s do it the same way again. And he didn’t get back to me in time, so I ended up using another song as a temporary melody, and then wrote the lyrics for the funeral ballad, and then I had to come up with a new melody, which was really hard ‘cause I had the other melody already stuck in my head associated with those lyrics. We came up with the new melody, and we hadn’t recorded a version of that yet.
There’s a song in Black Axe that I did the melody and the lyrics for. And there’s a song in Legends of the Guard volume 2, called “The Timber Mice.” The artist who did the work on that, Justin Gerard, I was having a hard time getting him to come on board to do a Legends story. He had done a comic once before for some other anthology, and he was intimidated by the amount of work. He’s a traditional illustrator who will put a ton of effort into one image. So the idea of breaking that up and doing a lot of smaller images, and maybe not taking quite as much time on each one, but still making it read clearly… he was having a hard time coming to grips with doing something like that again.
So I said, “I’ve got an idea. What if I did something that was like a song, where almost sheet music would be on the page, and you would just do a spot illustration per page?” And he said he’d be up for that. Normally, Legends issues, the anthology part of it was all done by other people and I kept my head out of it, unless someone asked me for help, and usually when I helped, I just helped. I didn’t work on it. But with that one, I needed more content. I needed the song. So I reached out to a jazz musician that I know and I said I needed something that was a little like a bedtime children’s song, more advanced than “Pop Goes the Weasel,” but something in that kind of vein. He quick-recorded four very different options, and I said “Yeah, I like number two!” or whichever number it was. “Can you send me the sheet music for that, with all the notations?” I hand-drew all the notations so it looked medieval, and I wrote the lyrics to fit that music. Then I sent that off to Justin to say here are the four moments that we need illustrated.
I guess to answer your question shortly, yes, there are songs. They’re kind of a mix of how much I do, but I always do part of it. I always do at least the lyrics.
Since you brought up Legends of the Guard, what do you think draws people into Mouse Guard? You don’t see a lot of non–Big Two comics that get a lot of people other than their original creators working on them.
Well, I think that’s not entirely true. I’m sure if you opened the gates to some other comic to have an anthology, you’d get people pouring in. A Turtles anthology, a new Hellboy anthology, whatever it is. You’d get lots and lots of creators wanting to be a part of it. I don’t think that Mouse Guard is unique in that way. I think the unique thing is that I said, Hey, let’s do an anthology.
So it’s just a matter of opening the doors.
I think so. The first question people usually ask about Legends is “How hard was it for you to allow other people to work in a world that’s so synonymous with you? This is your world. It’s not even like there’s a writer and an artist and you both share it. This is all you. This is your project, and now you’re letting everybody have a little piece of it.” But I was okay with that, because that was the point. And I had worked in some caveats so it would never be a problem. The fact that all the stories are Tall Tales and Legends really helped, because that means if they write something that feels off, or draws something that feels off, it doesn’t feel like it fits in my world or that’s certainly not how I’d handle that situation, it’s okay. It’s a Tall Tale. So it was easy, and I picked nearly everybody who went in. There were a few times when there were some suggestions because of the publisher. But everybody was somebody I would feel comfortable with, or I would’ve said no. In fact, there were a couple where I did say no. When somebody suggested, “Oh I think you should ask this person.” And I don’t think that’s the right fit. But I already vetted everyone who went in, because I knew of their work for the most part.
You mentioned that you created Saxon, Kenzie, and Rand at first. So when did Lieam come in?
Boy, it’s hard for me to know the exact timeline, but it’s a couple of years later. I like basing characters, at least to some degree, on people I know, even if I’m just taking one of their attributes and saying, this is the so-and-so character because they’re smart, or this is the so-and-so character because of that, or whatever. And there was a friend of mine who I’d met, I think in high school maybe once. He’s several years younger than me. He was a freshman when I was a senior. But after I graduated – I was still in town because I went to community college – so some of my friends who were just a year behind me, still in high school, knew him. So he kind of became a part of my circle of friends after I was already out of high school, and I liked the kid a lot. He impressed me. His name’s Emerson, and he became a good friend. And so I wrote in Lieam as an Emerson character, this kind of younger,tag-along character who had a lot of potential. That’s who Lieam was, this young character who’s probably too young to be hanging out with the older kids, but he’s cool enough or he has enough potential that the older kids go, okay, you can hang with us, it’s cool.
And he becomes arguably the main character.
Yeah, that took me by surprise! So I ended up including Lieam in the first issue, when I was starting the series. I had lots of headcanon of some timeline stuff. And part of the problem was that the stories with Rand were very, very big. They had to deal with the Weasel War and all this other stuff. And I thought, those are too big of stories to use, (1) for a first-time creator, and (2) for new readers to get into the series to understand what the hell is going on. We had to get past mice with swords having adventures for a little bit before I could drop something bigger. So doing a story after Rand, or with Lieam, meant I could do a smaller adventure story.
But Lieam, because he’s young, because he’s a little inexperienced, becomes the gateway for the reader to have things explained. If all the characters were experienced, and they were like “Ho ho! Why are we doing this?” “Well, this is why we are doing this, just like we always do, this is our procedure.” That comes off really forced and fake. It’s hard to get info to the audience that way. But because Lieam is inexperienced, older characters can feel the need to explain to him, or he can ask questions, and those questions can be answered for the reader. So Lieam became a great way to do exposition without it feeling forced. Once I started working on the series, that first issue where he kills the snake, how do you go back to being the little brother character after that? And by the end of Fall, I was like, oh, he’s actually really important now. So the Black Axe book became all about him being chosen to be the Black Axe.
You touched on something that was gonna be my next question, and you probably hate this question. But how are the timelines looking for the Weasel War of 1149?
I do hate that question. I had started working on it last year. It was going slowly, but it was progressing. There are pages drawn, there’s a script written. I’ve got the cover for issue 1, and there was real progress being made. It was slow for that reason, but also, my mom has Parkinson’s and had moved from living alone about an hour north of us to living about five, ten minutes away from us in assisted living. And at first I thought, oh, this is going to be great because when there’s a problem I don’t have to drive an hour to go fix it. She’s only ten minutes away. And it just meant that I was always ten minutes away, so I should come and fix everything. And her health was getting worse; she was getting less compliant with taking medications and working with the staff. I guess that was a couple of years ago now. It just meant that working was hard, because I was never able to just fully invest a day in work. I had to keep going, getting interrupted, and it was emotionally draining.
But last year, for lots of reasons, the care facility wasn’t really up for the level of care she needed. She needed more than they can provide, and her personal finances ran out, and so she now lives in our house, and my wife and I are her full-time caregivers. So with all of that, it’s just impossible to actively work on the series. So we’re trying to figure out some ways for me to maybe work part-time on it, like have some dedicated days of the week when I know I can be working on it and hope I can dig into a story and not lose my train of thought on intervening days, and also try to find something that’s a better, long-lasting permanent solution from her.
I’m sorry to hear that.
It’s okay. I’m very appreciative of the fact that there are lots of impatient fans that as soon as they understand why, they’re like “No, take your time, we’ll wait.” I’m very fortunate that my fans keep telling me the mantra “Family first,” which is very nice.
So if every one of the Mouse Guard characters is based on people you know, is there one based on you?
I have! I actually got docked points by Luke (Crane, game designer of the Mouse Guard RPG) because I did some very un-Saxon-like things towards the end of the campaign. I kinda went against his instincts and did things that were not very Saxon-ish. He was like, “You actually lose some points in the rules for that.” And I just said, “Oh, I guess you’re right. That wasn’t very Saxon of me.” ‘Cause Saxon is based on some of my worst traits. Saxon is based on some of my role-playing game characters that I’d tend to play when we’d play other games like Shadowrun or D&D.
But Saxon’s not… a bad person…
No, but there’s some arrogance there. Yeah, some of that arrogance is justified, he’s good at what he does, but it’s not infallible. He’s not infallible, and so I feel like he acts like his arrogance is. He’s a leap before he looks kind of mouse, he’s quick to anger. And those aren’t necessarily great traits to have. They’re not bad, entirely. They have their benefits. It’s why the Saxon and Kenzie relationship actually works well, and I have Celanawe actually comment on it, in that Saxon is too quick to those things, and Kenzie is too in his own head and trying to think logically and trying to come up with the perfect plan. Something bad will happen because Saxon forces it to happen, or something bad will happen because Kenzie’s inactivity will allow something bad to happen. But when the two are looking out for each other, it balances out a little.
I find it hard to believe that you got docked points for a character you created based on you!
He was right, though! He even said… I did the action, I think I let a squirrel go with a warning, didn’t lose my temper, and came up with a logical way to keep the squirrels out in the future. And the gamemaster is like, “That is the most un-Saxon-like response to what just happened.” And I was like “Weeeeell.” And he said “Come on, Saxon would have at least cut that squirrel and threatened him not to come back. You were kind of being more like Kenzie there than Saxon.” And I said, “Yeah.” And then he pointed out, “For most of the adventure, you were Saxon, and at the very end you kinda wrapped it up.” But I said “I just didn’t feel like I wanted to cut that squirrel. It just felt kinda harsh.” And he said “But Saxon would’ve.” And I said, “Yeah, Saxon would’ve.” So it was entirely fair and justified.
You’re working with talking animals. How do you avoid unintentional comedy? When the mice get on the rabbits, that’s something other creators would’ve done over the top, done it comedic, or done it too serious and it’d come across comedic unintentionally.
I guess I don’t even think about it. There’s some humor in there, but I think it feels real. Like the rabbits have thick accents, and they use some replacement words, like they call the mice “squeakers” instead of “mice,” and while they’re talking between themselves, they almost think that the mice can’t understand them. And then Saxon basically says “We can hear you, you know.” Except he’s saying, “We can understand what you’re saying! We’re right here!” And I think there’s some comedy in that, but it’s not meant to be like silly comedy.
We still see a lot of stuff these days in comics about whether or not it’s still kid-friendly, and a lot of it is about the gore. I would say Mouse Guard is really kid-friendly, but you’ve got stuff like someone getting their leg cut off, they’re getting stabbed… aside from the animals, what do you think keeps it friendly for all ages?
All those things have consequences, for starters. When characters die, or when Conrad’s leg comes off, the characters react to that, and it’s permanent. It’s not just GI Joe cannon fodder where they just fall or more of them stand up and come back, or the wound didn’t really count, he’s fine. Or they get shot with one of those lasers and they go “Ah!” and then they get back up and go “I’ll be all right, let’s keep going.” Or mainstream superhero stuff where superheroes die and they’re brought back two issues later. There are permanent consequences for every one of those things in Mouse Guard, and I’m just not a big gore guy. So I don’t tend to show the gore of what’s actually happening. When Conrad’s leg gets severed in Black Axe, I had to show it. There was no way to not show it. But in other books, there are times when characters die and it’s kind of done off screen. You don’t see it, you see the reactions of the other characters. Conrad was in a huddled mass of crabs, and we just knew that he was gone. There’s one word balloon where he goes like “Grcckkkk”, and that’s it.
There’s one in Black Axe that I’m really proud of, which is when the crow dies. I’ve had lots of fans tell me how horrific and graphic – they’re praising me, “That was so horrific, so graphic, and it made me cry, and I can’t believe you drew how bloody that was.” They’re referring to all this gore, and I’ll flip it open and I’ll say “Where? Show me where.” Because if you look at that scene, I don’t show the crow ever getting hurt, really. You see its face looking shocked, you see the fishers biting on feathers, but it’s not like the body, it’s almost like loose feathers, and then a couple of drops of blood in the air. But you never see a wound on the crow, you never saw a dead crow. I think the real kicker is it’s a lot of really close, tight panels that imply violence, and a big panel of M, the crow’s handler, weeping, and Celanawe’s narration saying, “I can’t imagine what it feels like to have an animal blaming you for its death.”
So it was the horror of what goes on in the reader’s mind, not what I drew. It’s workarounds like that, almost like a Hitchcock thing. Their reactions, and what goes on in the reader’s mind is more horrific than anything I could draw.
Can you tell us anything about the movie?
Nothing more than what’s already been talked about. I can recap. 20th Century Fox has the rights. They are anxious to be working on it. They are every positive, and things seem to be moving nicely. Gary Whitta has written the first draft of the screenplay, and Wes Ball has been brought on board to direct. He directed the Maze Runner movies, and he’s a director the studio has a lot of faith in. I’ve met with him several times, he’s a big fan of Mouse Guard, he’s anxious to get it going. And we have Matt Reeves, who directed the Planet of the Apes films, on board as executive producer. The plan is for it to be all motion-capture. So having someone like Matt Reeves on board is really important, because he’s a guy who knows how to handle that kind of technology, coming from the Apes films, but still tell a story, kind of see an overall vision for how to balance those things, or how to do a movie that is in actuality all effects, but doesn’t feel like an effects movie. And Wes, having come from the Maze Runner books where it’s a beloved, young-adult fiction series and treating that as a franchise, very special effects—heavy, he’s the kind of guy who should be doing Mouse Guard.
You’ve worked on Wind in the Willows as an illustrated adaptation. Any more plans to do adaptation work?
Nope, no plans. That one was a bucket list one. And it was a real challenge. That’s also part of why Weasel War didn’t get started several years ago. It was a bucket list project that I really wanted to do, and it took much longer than I thought. It took a long time, and I can’t think of another project right now that I would be as passionate about as something like illustrating Wind in the Willows that would make me not work… If I’m gonna work on a long project, it would be Mouse Guard, I guess is what I’m saying. I can’t think of anything that I’d be more excited about to work on as a long-term project than Mouse Guard.
How about a short-term project? I’ve seen you do variant covers for TMNT, you did something for Strangers in Paradise. Anyone approach you to do an issue of an ongoing comic?
I know I’ve been asked by IDW to do some Turtles interiors, and I kinda feel like I’ve been asked by a couple of other publishers to do others. Usually though, they ask me to do a one-shot graphic novel, not so much a one-shot issue. But yeah, I just always have to decline just because I have to be working on Mouse Guard. My fans have been waiting long enough, I’ve been waiting long enough. But even doing an issue is too long, I think, for me to take time away from doing Mouse Guard. But doing things like variant covers, it’s nice. It gives me something to do that’s kind of different. Right now, with my situation taking care of my mom, it’s the perfect kind of thing, because stopping and starting throughout the day because you have to go take care of her and see what’s going on – and with the dementia stuff, it can be emotionally draining as well – and then coming back to your desk and going, “Where was I?” Doing that in the middle of a cover is very different than doing that in the middle of a story and trying to pick up all the subplots. What were people in the background doing? Do I need to change something here? How does this tie in to the panel from two pages ago? You know, all those kinds of stresses. Whereas with a cover, it’s a straightforward image. It’s this one image, so there’s a lot less of that stuff to keep track of.
So doing all those variant covers for Turtles, I’m doing a lot of those covers right now for Dark Crystal. It’s the perfect kind of job, it keeps my hand moving, it keeps me drawing, it keeps people knowing I’m still alive, it keeps the income coming in, and it kind of fits with what’s going on in my life right now.
Thank you for your time.
Thanks for the interview.
Need to get started on Mouse Guard? We can get you started:
I first read X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga in a trade paperback published in 1991, meaning I had just really started getting into comics. Trade paperbacks weren't common at the time, so they only collected the landmark issues with high demand. Dark Phoenix came out in 1980, meaning 11 years had passed and it was still in high demand.
How the Dark Phoenix Saga Shaped Me as a Fan
by Duy
First of all, I want to point out this beautiful cover by Bill Sienkiewicz.
Seriously, in the mid-90s, we loaned this comic out to a friend, who promptly lost it and only found it again 20 years later. I refused to buy a new copy of the book, because Bill's cover was no longer issued, and I refused to buy it with any other cover. I think it's that gorgeous.
Rereading it now made me realize how much this one particular story truly shaped me as a fan. There is so much in here, and most of it is gold. It's got the introduction of the Hellfire Club, including Emma "The White Queen" Frost. It's got the debut of Dazzler and Kitty Pryde. And it's got Wolverine and the sequence that's so famous as being his breakout moment.
Wolverine wasn't Wolverine yet, not yet the franchise player for Marvel that he'd later become, meaning that he could lose, he could be hurt, and it's really just that he didn't fear death.
But most of all, it had Jean Grey and Scott Summers, and their love for each other holding the story together. When Jean is mind-controlled by Mastermind and becomes the Black Queen, flirting with the other members of the Hellfire Club, Scott manages to keep his cool and his patience, waiting for Jean to break out of it and save him.
When Jean finally loses control and takes down the X-Men, Scott shows up to reason with her. You can almost hear background music shifting from something fast and suspenseful to something soulful and emotional.
When Jean's life is in the hands of the Shi'ar for killing a whole solar system, the X-Men all go through internal debates as to whether or not they can fight for Jean. Scott never wavers.
And when Jean loses control of herself and becomes Dark Phoenix again, she saves Scott, and the universe, by sacrificing herself.
Yes, I know that this may constitute as fridging, the story of the woman who can't control power, and it's very possible that if I'd read it for the first time now, I'd feel differently. But back then, and still now, all I saw was a love story with life and death repercussions. And the entire ending sequence still gets to me, today, 27 years later. The fact that a bunch of this isn't shown from the characters' points of view, forcing you to fill in the blanks yourself, makes it more powerful. John Byrne tells a dynamic enough story with the rest of the details; Chris Claremont's prose brings it home.
Once upon a time, there was a woman named Jean grey, a man named Scott Summers.
They were young. They were in love.
They were heroes.
Today, they will prove it beyond all shadow of a doubt.
I loved it.
Soon after I read the Dark Phoenix Saga, I read X-Men: X-Tinction Agenda, published in 1992. The first scene had Jean Grey back. Not only that, it was explained that Phoenix was never Jean Grey at all, but a completely separate entity that thought it was Jean. In the interim, Cyclops had married Madelyne Pryor, a woman who looked exactly like Jean, had a child with her (he grew up to be Cable), and then she turned evil. Much later on, Jean would die again and Cyclops would get into a relationship with Emma Frost, and by the time I'd read Avengers: Children's Crusade in 2013, I thought, wow, Cyclops is a jerk.
Except none of that matters to me.
I get that because of these changes, some readers may think Dark Phoenix was cheapened. That it wasn't really Jean; that Scott isn't really a character to sympathize with. That it may as well not have really happened.
Except it didn't really happen. It's fiction. It's as real as you make it, as real as what you put into it. And in my book, Jean Grey died as Dark Phoenix, sacrificing herself to save the universe. In my book, Cyclops isn't an insufferable tool. Any stories I enjoy afterwards with them in it are bonuses. They're nice to have. And it's not hard to reconcile them in my head, because it's fiction. They fit together however you want it to. I guess I could have said they ruined the story and that I could never read The Dark Phoenix Saga again because of what happened, but I can, because I do genuinely love that story.
The Dark Phoenix Saga impacted my comics reading habits in many ways. It taught me that, yes, you can judge a book by its cover. It taught me the importance of character development, of establishing character dynamics so your readers can pick up on anything, any scene, with just the visual shorthand. It taught me that you didn't need to start a comic at the beginning in order for it to have an impact on you. But most of all, it taught me that stories can be powerful, and that the only person who can take that impact away from you is the person looking back at you in the mirror.
In 2013, George Perez left his exclusive contract at DC Comics, citing the desire for more creative freedom, and signed with Boom! Studios. In 2014, what was supposed to be his first series, Sirens (originally titled She-Devls), debuted. Sirens is like Perez's previous creator-owned work Crimson Plague in the sense that every character in it is based on a real person, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. Crimson Plague was a solo book; Sirens was a team book. Crimson Plague asked for fans to submit their photos so Perez could use them as models; Sirens uses Perez's friends, most notably a number of cosplayers whom he cast as the leads. And of course, Crimson Plague never finished; Sirens did.
Fanisha, bottom center, is based on Perez's wife, Phoenica Flynn.
The first thing that'll pop out at you when reading Sirens is that it's all over the place, mainly because it's a time-traveling jaunt. It starts in Viking times, with dragons and barbarians, and before long we're in the Wild West, Victorian England, 1980s New York, samurai-era Japan, and the Roman Empire. You can kinda tell that it's Perez writing stuff he wants to draw.
Perez clearly had fun designing these costumes as well, and he even has the Sirens' leader, Highness, providing commentary on female superhero costumes.
There's a bit of a debate among superhero fans about the appropriateness of female superhero costumes. They're impractical, and no one would wear them into battle, for the most part — but this is a series based on cosplayers, and it's obvious that they love dressing up in these things, so practicality takes a backseat to looking aesthetically pleasing, not just to the male gaze but also to what women would like to see themselves dressed up in.
For my part, I've long thought it's got more to do with posing and how people are drawn rather than the costume itself. A great artist can make anyone look imposing, threatening, and respectful, while an artist determined to be salacious can take a fully clothed woman and pose her in such a way that would still be deemed inappropriate. Adding to that argument is the character of Agony, based on professional wrestler April Hunter, and who dresses up like a professional wrestler:
I get a little weirded out with the number of scenes with sexual overtones in this series, knowing full well that Perez has always been a vocal and open advocate of sexiness in comics. It's always a little weird to see male artists put female characters into such sexually compromising positions, so often. Highness gets introduced while naked and in chains, having been a prisoner and "rented" out to various men during captivity, before she breaks out. Akira/Kage is a geisha walking away from that life. And Skywire is a Victorian-era prostitute who makes no apologies for it.
I think there are three things that ultimately make it okay for me. The first is that Perez is a friend of all the women involved, and they absolutely adore him, so presumably they all consented to their corresponding portrayals. The second is that I'm fairly certain if a woman wrote the same thing, I wouldn't even be thinking about it. And the third is the fact that all of these circumstances are an inversion of power. Kage is a geisha who's also the world's greatest samurai. Highness is introduced in chains so she can break out of it and lead this team. Skywire lures in Jack the Ripper, specifically so she can kill him.
Perez also is fairly literally ambitious with this story, employing some overt symbolism. A Macguffin in this story is the blade of a villain named Perdition, Highness' former lover:
And here's the ship the Sirens travel in:
But the true ambition comes in how Perez attempts to explain all the time travel and the alternate realities it causes. Perdition's blade cleaves time and space, so we have a near-infinite number of realities (and how fitting is it that Perez's swan song comes with a multiversal crisis?), and it's there where the character of Chan Everest, aka Bombshell, takes center stage. Here she is trying to prevent Highness in the Sirens ship from colliding to Earth:
She fails, and then we see this page:
Yep, it's a comic-within-a-comic. While hiding out in the mid-80s, Chan Everest drew comics of the Sirens, with the story ideas coming to her in her dreams. That leads to some sequences that are depicted in various stage of comic book production:
Chan's inability to change the Sirens' fate in the comics belies another artistic debate about just how much of the narrative is in the control of the creator, and just how much of it is the characters taking over their own lives.
It does all ultimately tie together, though I won't spoil how here. Does it tie together well? You'll have to judge that for yourself, as I've read it three times and I think my answer is no, not really. I think the ambition gets the better of Perez in this one, unfortunately.
A couple more gripes I have with this book can be illustrated with this close-up of Bombshell.
The coloring is flat, with gradients looking like they have more distinctive endpoints and demarcations than a smooth fluid transition from one shade to another. In today's day and age when the colorists have more of an impact than ever, this just seems like a really weird choice.
But the other thing is not even something I can really legitimately gripe about, and that's that Perez's skill is so clearly fading that it makes me sad to see. He suffered tendinitis in his drawing hand in 2003, and before he signed with Boom!, he had eye surgery. This is, all things considered, still pretty good work, and if you're not a Perez fan, maybe nothing looks off at all. But I've read George Perez's work since I could read, and to see it get to a level below his overall standards, for reasons he can't control (it took two years for six issues to even come out), is just heartbreaking.
So it isn't Perez's best work, but you know what? If I could have my last work be something I created from scratch, my own project, and have it involve my family and friends? If I could get them all to see themselves in this thing I was doing? And if, among all that, I could place the woman I love front and center in this story?
George Perez has said he's basically retired. George is my favorite artist of all time, the most important artist of my life, and I've talked about him at length. I've talked about JLA/Avengers. I've gone over his Wonder Woman. I've discussed his New Teen Titans and his run on the 1998 Avengers. Sachs and Violens was one of the first comics I reviewed for The Comics Cube. Most recently, I've gone over the Infinity Gauntlet. I've even gone over Crimson Plague. As it's pretty clear that there probably will be no new Perez series for me to read from this point forward, I can at least do the next best thing: reread his old stuff and write about them. Today, we go over some of his lesser-known stuff, from an ill-fated company called CrossGen.
I stopped collecting comic books in late 1999 due to financial constraints, and didn't get back into it until I was in college and making money working various on-campus jobs in 2005. A huge thing I missed in the interim was the rise and fall of a company called CrossGen, short for Cross Generation Entertainment.
CrossGen was notable for a number of things. Off the page, owner Mark Alessi utilized guaranteed, exclusive contracts — then a rarity for the industry — as well as a studio setup, in which all the creators moved to Florida and worked together in the same physical space, in a time when they were used to working freelance in whichever locations they wanted to work. They also provided creators with a steady salary (Perez has said the fixed salary for 10 issues a year matched what would have been his page rate) as well as medical and dental plans. This was a very forward-thinking company.
On the page, however, CrossGen was a well-oiled machine, already having their characters and universe created by Alessi and Gina M. Villa even prior to launch. The shared universe, known as the Sigilverse, has a simple concept: every single series takes place on a different planet, with the protagonist receiving a sigil branded onto their skin. The sigil would give them powers. That's it. It's that simple. It kept all their series self-contained while at the same time making it clear that at some point or another they would cross over, and there'd be a culmination.
My introduction to CrossGen happened, as with my introduction to the DC Universe and the Marvel Universe decades prior, because of George Perez. I'd discovered the DC Universe due to Crisis on Infinite Earths and George Perez's Who's Who in the DC Universe covers; the Marvel Universe got me with The Infinity Gauntlet. And the reason I got back into comics in 2005 was Infinite Crisis, which George was a part of. So of course after that, I had to see what he'd been up to, and there it was: CrossGen Chronicles.
CrossGen Chronicles was a bimonthly series where each issue was devoted to telling the history of an already-running series. Each issue was therefore written by the writer of the series being spotlighted, and ostensibly would have a different artist per issue. But out of eight total issues, George Perez drew four. And comics as a medium is all the better for it.
Let's start with issue #2, featuring Scion as written by Ron Marz (the original series artist was a young Jim Cheung, making it worth reading for that alone). Scion tells the tale of Ethan, the youngest prince of the Heron Dynasty, currently at peace with the Raven Dynasty after centuries of fighting. The coming of Ethan's sigil comes at the worst possible time, instigating war and rekindling old generations-long vendettas. This issue of Chronicles tells the tale of Admirals Edvin (Heron) and Alexi (Raven), and how they brokered the peace between the two dynasties.
For those of us used to seeing Perez for absurd detail and group shots, they're still there. But this issue allows him to stretch his wings both in terms of content (swords! boats!) and layouts.
It's really the 3rd issue, focusing on Barbara Kesel's Meridian, that's the standout of the group, however. The story takes place on Demetria, a world composed of floating island city-states. The main character, Sephie of Meridian, is one of the two sigil-bearers, the other being her uncle Ilahn, who is out for total control. This issue of Chronicles tells the tale of how Ilahn tried and failed to win over Sephie's mom, and has one of the most beautiful covers I've ever seen.
Sephie's mom was an artist and drew the story of Meridian on her scrolls, which Perez uses to great effect in this issue. Again, if you're here to see Perez with his trademark crowd shots and lavish detail, it's all here:
But it's also here where Laura DePuy's colors really come into play, as with this shot of Sephie's mom boarding a ship:
The story itself is quite touching, a tale of courtship and true love, though tragic since you know Sophie's parents don't survive. You don't need to have read Meridian to enjoy this one-off, which is actually true of all the Chronicles issues since they all stand on their own. But it's true more so for this issue than any of the others.
We meet the cast of Mark Waid's Sigil in the fourth issue, detailing main character Samandahl Rey's feud with the Tchlusarud, a Saurian of Tcharun. This one's a fairly standard sci-fi story.
But the magic (this is a pun, and you'll see why) comes back with the next issue, featuring Ron Marz's Mystic (see? I told you.). Giselle, the main character of this series, is a reluctant wielder of magicks, and thus a reluctant Guild Master in the island of Ciress. Ciress is made of six houses of magick, and this issue of Chronicles tells a hidden history. The opening sequence is one of the most inventive I've seen:
Look! It's just a book! But it's moving and it's pretty.
Turns out, there used to be eight houses of magick on Ciress, and this tells the story of how there came to be only seven.
The resulting story is, like Meridian's issue, simultaneously touching, impactful, and tragic. Mystic, if I may, is my favorite of all the CrossGen series that I've read. It's fun, it's fast-paced, and it tells a story of two sisters who grow stronger because one is given the gifts that the other one wanted. It's very human. And yet, very magical.
There were other series, such as Ruse, a sigil-based Sherlock Holmes story, or Sojourn, which has a medieval-type setting and focused on an archer named Arwyn trying to kill the sigil-bearer of her world. But as far as Perez was concerned, he drew the ongoing series Solus, with a godlike being named Solusandra.
As it turns out, Solusandra is the creator of the sigils.
So her story was supposed to lead into the big culmination, called Negation War. But it wasn't to be — due to poor management, financial troubles, and a host of other things that have nothing to do with the medium and artform of comics, CrossGen folded in 2004, eventually selling their assets to Disney. Marvel tried reviving them in 2010, but it didn't take.
And so folded CrossGen, but not before producing some pretty fine comics, including some of the best work of George Perez's career.
"I will always be grateful to Mark Alessi," Perez says in George Perez: Storyteller, "and the entire CrossGen staff for the incredible respect they paid me and all the concessions they made for me. I'm enjoying a great deal of success now, and CrossGen helped get the ball rolling."
The biggest concession Perez is referring to is a clause in his contract that said he could be released if DC and Marvel were to finally do a crossover between the Justice League of America and the Avengers, and if he'd be tapped as the artist. The contract for JLA/Avengers came at the last possible day delineated in his contract. And so the greatest crossover in comic book history was made, but not until after he'd stretched his wings farther and stepped out of his comfort zone on CrossGen Chronicles and Solus, which unfortunately will likely never be collected.
Some of you may have noticed in our Black Panther Roundtable, the notable absence of one of our Roundtable regulars. It's not that Zulu LaMar Forte didn't have much to say; it's that he had a lot. LaMar is one of the Cube's oldest friends and first supporters, and he's not just a comics fan but also a true student of African history. There was a lot to lay out there in terms of the movie, and so, I turn it over to him.
Black Panther, In Respect of Retrospect
(or “Light A Candle, It's About to Get Real Black In Here”)
by Zulu LaMar Forte
When I saw the final costume for T'Challa in Captain America: Civil War, I had a feeling that Marvel was on to something. The costume itself told a story, in that moment. And it made me think about the stories that could be told within the MCU framework, whether or not they would be told, and what sort of care and attention would be given to the particulars.
Seemingly for a number of the people that have or will see this movie, just getting a movie with an all-black cast that gives them a good reason to pay top dollar for stale popcorn and a week's worth of carbonated beverages is good enough; as an African raised in the diaspora of North America, the norm for me is trusting people that don't look or think like me, that aren't me, to do justice to who my ancestors were...and ultimately, to who I am. And as much as I thoroughly enjoyed Black Panther I would be irresponsible to not give thought to it here, and look at it outside of the popcorn n' pop soda perspective. To put a film like this, which I found to be a multilayered marvel generally, under the proper scrutiny that I have never had the luxury of avoiding, I pose 3 questions, in three parts:
• Who was the African before colonization?
• Who was the African during colonization?
• Who is the African, afterward (and now)?
I: Who Was The African Before Colonization?
I could answer my own question with something like “the original man” or “the mother and father of civilization,” and while both those statements are factual, they still don't do our history justice. One of the lasting refrains of my life has been “What has Africa really contributed to the world?” and if I can be candid for a moment, “just about everything” is a more than appropriate answer: humanity, ethics, writing, spirituality, science, mathematics (the combination of the last three in particular is unique, and found nowhere else but at its place of origin), law, and social order are all human achievements that have both origins and highly developed apexes in Africa. Even the most staunch deniers of these would still have to admit that the world's wealth was made on the backs of my people, only for us to be locked out of benefiting from that wealth.
No conversation about Africa, or Africans, is complete without bringing up the pillar of our nature, and social order: the concept of Ma'at. Ma'at is the embodiment of a multitude of concepts such as truth, justice, righteousness, equality, reciprocity, sobriety, harmony...but the head of all these is balance. As a living concept Ma'at (this is the part where I make it clear: contrary to popular belief, what most people call the “gods” of Kemetic culture are not actual beings that people worshiped, they were attributes of nature given a human form and used to tell stories and teach lessons, as there was no concept of religion or need an outside savior) takes the form of a Kemetic woman, because the aforementioned concepts are considered feminine traits.
The Dora Milaje are based on Kemetic warrior queens such as Nzingha, but also on Marcus Garvey's all-woman bodyguard squad and the warrior women of Dahomey
This is not a slight or an insult, because that balance that Ma'at embodies is a universal balance reflected on all planes of existence, and as such that balance was also found in the relationship between a man and a woman. There was no misogyny, sexism, or hatred of women, because it never occurred to anybody to think of a woman as being anything other than equally divine when put beside a man. This is something that not many people can actually believe, or even appreciate properly, because all most of us know is the inverse. And when I explain this I almost always get a “well it's not like that anymore” and it usually comes from those of European ancestry, because they cannot imagine a world or people that have no concept or hatred for women and if they could, it would have to be a thing of the past, as opposed to something that still lives in the people that created it.
The first concept of what we would call a “goddess” later on comes from the Congo, and just so happens to coincide with the origin of humanity. Nut (newt) is the personified concept of the universe, and her body consists of the universe in its totality. Usually depicted as reaching across the sky, the heavenly bodies came directly from her womb, and the sun itself died every night only to be taken into her mouth and reborn in the morning. Pepi II of Kemet said “The heavens are found between the legs of the goddess Nut” famously, and Dr. Yosef Ben Jochannan, whom we call “Dr. Ben” lovingly, came along in the 20th century and brought it full circle: “Just as the heavens are found between the legs of Nut, on Earth heaven is found between the legs of the black woman.” You cannot have a concept like this and hate women, or think them beneath you, and likewise you cannot perpetuate a concept like this if you view men as being beneath you. This is what we call the dialectical law of opposites, and in African culture opposites are seen as divine instead of defined against a negative and corrupted structure.
This plays into Black Panther, being set in an African country that has defied colonization, and these concepts are clearly left intact because of it. It is the nature of Ma'at, and as a result the African, for the woman to be the giver of the ways, and the man to be the enforcer of the ways. Tehuti was the compliment of Ma'at and his role was to record events, and as such he scribed the 42 Negative Confessions as she called them out; his zoo-type was the ibis, because the long pointed bill of the ibis resembles a pen. T'Challa, a single and childless African man, has women around him that respect his position and in turn he knows and understands that his personal power comes directly from them. The movie did a fantastic job of laying a base for something that, for most people, is a foreign concept. Even the concept of the throne is born from the matrilineal system, as the throne is symbolic of the lap of the mother, and T'Challa's throne has the same configuration as ones we see in Kemetic reliefs and scrolls.
One thing that stuck out to me was the me'ri (love) between T'Challa and the women in the film. It isn't often that level of care is given to relationships between African men and women in films and television, and usually when it is done it's so heavy-handed and not well thought out. They had disagreements without yelling at one another, and never allowed these disagreements to interrupt or define their relationship. It was refreshing to see that, especially when we have other programs that show families, royal or not, at each others' necks so often. Not once did T'Challa call into question their capabilities, and even when he was defeated never did they consider deserting or berating him for it.
Ma'at is also shown in how the elders are treated. In the words of Baba John Henrik Clarke, “In Africa nobody had a word for “old folks' home” because nobody had ever thrown away grandma and grandpa.” Elders were-and are, despite the best attempts of a white supremacist patriarchal mechanism-revered and not looked at as dead weight. For example anybody that grew up in a black church knew that the oldest woman was known as “the mother of the church.” Not an official position, but the mother was given the highest respect and you'd get mangled for sitting in her favorite seat, in the least. The Wakandan elders were afforded the same esteem by everyone, even those not of royalty. One of the few ways I could come up with to make the film better was to have elders from out community in the movie; Winnie Mandela (RIP), Shaharazad Ali and Baba Dick Gregory (RIP) imparting wisdom to T'Challa, his sister Shuri, and even his mother Ramonda? Yes, every time and all the time.
I Photoshopped this pic of Baba Dick Gregory in traditional African garb
II: Who Was The African During Colonization?
The plight and struggle of the African today often makes for a tense and laborious discussion, mostly because of a failure or refusal to admit its genesis. The primary weapon of the conqueror, whether it be the European or the Arab before them, was a distortion and corruption of the greatest gift we gave to mankind. Despite the near-universal resistance to the idea, African spiritual concepts gave birth to what we now know as religion, and the fact that these concepts were distorted and used to attempt to destroy us is a violation that the English language has no suitable words for. Never mind that missionaries commonly worked as agents to “spread the word of God” in order to take away land from native Africans, often with death as an end result. Those details are typically seen as inconsequential or best left no discussed, as to not rile up people who may hear them and not take it well.
It isn't enough to say that colonization interrupted African progress; the conquering of Kemet halted human progress as a whole, because while Kemet wasn't the creator of most of these spiritual and scientific concepts, it was the zenith of them. We can attribute these scientific and spiritual concepts to both Kush (Ethiopia, and it's not a coincidence that 'ethics' has its birthplace here) and the aforementioned Congo.
Imhotep himself is paid tribute in the Hippocratic Oath, in the opening line. “I swear by Apollo the Healer, by Asclepius, by Hygieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses” of course refers to Greek gods, and of those four gods only 3 are fictional. Asclepius is the Greek god of medicine, and is the name given Imhotep when they added him to their pantheon. Hippocrates himself declared “I am a child of Imhotep” due to him studying Imhotep's work, thousands of years after his death. Imhotep used what we consider modern medical tools, such as scalpels, as well as the first recorded prescriptions.
I understood the mathematics involved with the Pythagorean Theorem because while I learned it formally in the 10th grade, I instantly recognized the theorem itself as being found in Kemetic mathematics-also knowing that Pythagoras studied with the Kheri Heb priests there. I always found it humorous that the Kheri Heb priests' curriculum consisted of 40 years of study, while Pythagoras, whom is considered to be one of the most intelligent people that ever lived, flunked out around year 22.
When looking at how Wakanda was depicted in Black Panther I immediately drew the parallel between it and both Kemet and Kush. Wakanda is a synthesis of the two, having Kemet's scientific pedigree while also maintaining Kush's spiritual and historic pedigree (Kush is one of the few African countries that was never conquered). I would imagine if Kemet was never conquered, it would look like Wakanda. I lamented with my nephew when talking about African history about what a sight it would be to see flying cars and trains zooming over and around the Great Pyramid of Giza, which would be in its original condition coated with white limestone. As excited as I am to go to Africa next year, not being able to watch the sun rise over the pyramids and have the light reflect off the limestone and across the desert is something that brings both a rage and bittersweet feeling I cannot describe.
The tribes of Wakanda are based on different African tribes.
Also I must state that there were several African dynasties and advanced cultures that were also destroyed, and while I can't go into detail here for lack of time and space, it's well worth the research.
The common line of thought, and this is why the language we uses matters, is that slaves were brought to what would later become the Americas and forced to work for free. But the fact is that doctors, artists, scientists, mathematicians, spiritualists and skilled people of all sorts were brought here and made slaves. This is an important distinction that must not be continued to be ignored or mimimalized.
III. Who Is The African, Afterward (And Now)?
Of the three questions posed, this one may be the most complex and the one most needing nuance. Of the many metaphors found throughout Black Panther the most continually referenced ones involve the relationship-and often battle-between African tradition and the contemporary circumstance that came with post-colonization Africans. We can go back to the early 20th century and see a great divide of perspective, most notable between The Talented Tenth and the followers of The Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey.
The Talented Tenth, who counted intellectual luminaries like W.E.B. Dubois amongst their number, were called so because they were considered the representatives of the ten percent of America-born Africans that had the privilege of a top shelf education (if you can call it that), and as such were allegedly the best qualified to lead their people to their destiny. From this tradition came the black bourgeoisie, or what can be called the “black and bougee” today. While their combined skill and knowledge base cannot be denied, these superlatives were often accompanied with an air of superiority that kept them from reaching the common person in their neighborhoods. They differed from other brilliant African minds like the previously mentioned Drs. Ben and Clarke in this manner; the latter split time between gathering a knowledge base and working with and for their people in an intimate manner, as well as training the next generation to do the same.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey created what is still the single greatest African movement ever founded in the Americas, and he did it by engaging Africans all over with his formidable oratory skills and then following up with strategic organizing. He had a vision of creating self-functioning communities that would lead to a way out of America and back to Africa, for those that wished to go, or a path to the kind of self reliance that a nation within a nation needs to sustain itself. His concept of Pan-Africanism didn't involve hating Europeans, as is the common trope associated with these sort of movements if you let outsiders tell it, but a re-instilling of pride in those of us with a direct African origin. Dr. Clarke compared the history of a people to a clock that gives them their accurate time of day, and a compass to direct them in the way they must go. And we as Africans have precious little to go on, compared to the other people of the world, thanks to the slave trade and how it destroyed the African family unit.
The pose that is known now as the “Wakanda Forever!” is the posture utilized by Ausar, while holding his staff and flail, most commonly seen in busts and Kemetic sarcophagi.
As T'Challa represents the traditional African man, Killmonger represents the African man born in the diaspora, long ago cut loose from the physical shackles of chattel slavery but still bound by the same spiritual and mental chains that prevent a people from their original destiny, in turn taking up the task of carrying out his master's ways and being the reflection of him instead of his Great Mother that nursed the entire planet in her lap.
One thing I keep hearing from moviegoers is how they wanted to see Killmonger have a redemption arc that ended with him ruling at T'Challa's side. This would have been impossible. Throughout the movie, he had no qualms about enacting gross violence towards his people, but especially the women. He starts the film out being violent towards a woman, and even when he is shown with an African woman he seems to care about, he has no problem killing her when she has outlived her usefulness. Such an egregious violation of Ma'at would have been more than enough to get him executed. Then once he becomes the nessu (king) his first act as a regent is to enact violence on an elder (also a woman). This is the sort of spirit and action that you can't just happily-ever-after from in a matrilineal society. He was well beyond redemption and this is what made his last line just as much of a violation; he didn't call on his ancestors once the entire movie, until it fit his purpose. That moment showed he had no interest in being anything they were, and it recalls one of Marcus Garvey's most famous quotes: "I have no desire to take all Black people back to Africa; there are Blacks who are no good here and will likewise be no good there."
The film explores other African motif and imagery (not at all intended to be all-inclusive):
During the club scene the outfits of T'Challa, Okoye and Nakia mirrored the colors of the Pan-African flag.
In the final fight scene Killmonger and Black Panther fight on an underground railroad.
The elders of Wakanda are wearing actual African garb from different African tribes.
The pose that is known now as the “Wakanda Forever!” is the posture utilized by Ausar, while holding his staff and flail, most commonly seen in busts and Kemetic sarcophagi.
The Dora Milaje are based on Kemetic warrior queens such as Nzingha, but also on Marcus Garvey's all-woman bodyguard squad and the warrior women of Dahomey
To close, I'd like to thank anyone and everyone that stuck with this thing to the end. I hope you learned something, or at least found something worth thinking about. This is just a surface reflection of what I could go into, but I find that the subject of the history of my people is very rewarding when self researched.
Also I'd like to dedicate this piece to all my mothers, those both here in the now and transitioned. Peace be upon you, and may the universe be pleased with you. Ase, ase, ase-o.
