Akeem Roberts

It takes a lot of hard work, dedication, and sacrifice to make it on your own as an artist, and Akeem Roberts knows this well. This illustrator and animator juggles being an associate director at Holler Studios with freelancing for The New Yorker. Even though Akeem’s been in the game for nearly a decade, I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing his work for many years to come.

We talked about Akeem’s new gig at Holler, and from there he went into sharing his unique approach to storytelling. Akeem also spoke about attending the University of South Carolina, went into some of his influences for his artistic style, and gave some great advice for handling operational tasks as a freelancer. Akeem knows that success doesn’t happen overnight, and he’s put in the time and effort to come out on top!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Akeem Roberts:
My name is Akeem S. Roberts. I’m a cartoonist for The New Yorker. illustrator for J.D. the Kid Barber series, and a book designer by day.

Maurice Cherry:
How has 2023 been going so far?

Akeem Roberts:
2023 has been pretty crazy so far. I started off the year unemployed, just doing freelance stuff, and as of like three weeks ago, I just got a brand new job and sort of getting the reins on that and everything’s been going pretty good.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, nice. Congratulations on the new job.

Akeem Roberts:
Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you have any plans for the summer? Anything you want to do?

Akeem Roberts:
For the summer, right now I don’t have anything planned. I’m sure I’ll just try to go to a beach or a lake or something and just relax for a little bit.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious, from last year to this year, aside from the employment change that you mentioned about, have there been any other kind of changes for you? Anything else going on?

Akeem Roberts:
I’d say from last year to this year, I’ve more committed to being in publishing versus animation, which was kind of the main thing that I did at the start of my career was mostly animation. After I started doing stuff at The New Yorker and stuff with Kokila, I slowly started making the transition into publishing.

Maurice Cherry:
What brought that transition on aside from just more work? Was it a feeling or anything?

Akeem Roberts:
I felt like for animation mostly it was things move a little bit slower and it feels like the artists… I guess I was a cog in the machine animation-wise, while publishing, even though I am still just in the machine, I have a little more of a voice and a little more of a say, and I guess it just feels more freeing.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds like there’s just more, I guess, agency, I guess, in publishing.

Akeem Roberts:
Yes, exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. Let’s talk about some of your work that you’re doing as a freelance illustrator. I’m curious, what does a regular day look like for you these days?

Akeem Roberts:
If I’m doing dailies for The New Yorker, I’ll try to get up around like 7:00 and then hit Twitter or some kind of news source and just go through trending and try to see what’s going on, what happened in the past 24 hours. Then, I’m seeing if I can find a joke and connect that into a bit for The New Yorker for their daily cartoons.

Maurice Cherry:
You’re creating new pieces every day, so you have to check the news, be like, “Oh, this is funny,” draw something, and-

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… then it’s just done? That’s it?

Akeem Roberts:
It depends on the process. Sometimes, for instance, I got one in for a daily after the trailer of the Barbie movie dropped. For that, I had an idea of doing something of scientists trying to get to the Barbie because there was all of those memes about people saying three, how many or whatever for Barbie movie tickets. I wanted to like have that idea of getting to the Barbie movie first and having it happen immediately, so I was first thinking like scientists creating a time machine to get there on the day that it’s released. Then, for The New Yorker, I thought of that idea, but I put a little bit of ’80s nostalgia in it, so then I changed it to kind of like Back to the Future where they’re trying to go to the future to see the Barbie movie.

Maurice Cherry:
Like Marty and Doc Brown and the DeLorean?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah, so they’re all sitting in the JCPenney parking lot trying to get to the Barbie movie.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s funny. It’s interesting, though, that you have to, I guess, get them in by a certain time, but it’s every day, so that makes sense, I guess.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah. For the dailies, it’s you have to get the sketches to them before 9:00, and then they’ll let you know if they like it or not by 10:00, and then you have that done by noon. The one that I did for the Barbie was like a bonus for the daily, so I didn’t have to get that done till 2:00.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. No, that’s just interesting that it’s so fast. I don’t know why I thought maybe you would have done it the day before or something like that.

Akeem Roberts:
I think some people do. I’m reckless.

Maurice Cherry:
I see you do a little bit of everything, book illustrations, you do comics, you do animation, you do editorial work. Is there a particular one of these that you prefer to do?

Akeem Roberts:
I think I prefer to do comics and publishing chapter book stuff. I feel like that gives me the most control, but also the most freedom. I feel like when you’re usually doing a comic book, you got to do like 30-something pages and the deadline’s pretty tight, but when it comes to chapter books or whatever, it’s a little bit… It’s still tight, but it’s not as, I don’t know, it’s not as hard just because you’re just doing one panel kind of basically, versus doing nine panels, trying to semi-tell a story, designing multiple backgrounds. It’s a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm. I can see how doing it in that sort of controlled format also, it’s just easier on you probably just on your workload, you know?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Talk to me about how you approach a new project. What does your process look like?? Does it vary per type?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, it definitely varies per type, per project. For anything that’s like New Yorker, that’s just I’m just on the subway jotting down ideas. I send my notes app and I’ll just like think of jokes, try to connect them, and then from there I’ll draw a little small thumbnail and then sketch a bigger illustration for that and then send that to the New Yorker. Then, my process for when I’m doing my web comics also starts on my phone. I just write a joke, describe what’s happening in the panels. Then, from there I do a thumbnail and then I finalize it and then add all the texts and stuff.

Then, for animation, usually with this, there’s only a couple of those that I started from scratch where I had a original character and original plot. Those started off more… I was in Word and Google Docs instead because it was longer format and I had to share it with other people to read, look over, see if they had any notes on the script. For those, it’s like script first, and then you start the thumbnails and animating each thing.

Maurice Cherry:
What if you’re doing, say, editorial work or something for the book? Is that process kind of the same?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, editorial is like you’ll… Most of the stuff that I did editorial for was like for Men’s Health. They have this section called Cool Dads-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Akeem Roberts:
… so for that, I would like… They would give me the article that a celeb wrote, and then I would read it. Then, from there, I would like think about an illustration that kind of hit the vibe of what the celeb wrote. The latest one I did was for like LeVar Burton. His whole thing was talking about reading books to his daughter and giving her the freedom to read and how he wants to be there for her. Then, he also makes a reference basically to Harry Potter.

For that, I just drew him in like the garbs with a wand fighting off the Dementors because in the article he talks about how his daughter stopped reading because she didn’t like the Dementors. He was like, “Maybe I should have not introduced her to Harry Potter.” I just took that vibe and added it to the illustration. I would send like three sketches and then the art director over there would pick which one they think is the best. Then, from there I would finish and color it and everything.

Maurice Cherry:
You kin of have to read a little bit of what it is that you’re going, then, to make sure that the illustration kind of matches that in some way.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah. With every editorial or even like the children’s book, you have to read the manuscript and everything first before you can fully get the gist of it to kind of sum it up in whatever illustration, whether it’s for a chapter or for an article.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Last year, I was Editor-in-Chief of a print magazine. This was part of the job that I was doing at the time, and our in-house creative director had decided for our first issue that he wanted to also do all the editorial illustrations. I was like, “Okay, that’s-

Akeem Roberts:
Uh-huh.

Maurice Cherry:
… “a lot, but if you want to do it.” He also did the cover and everything. I was like, “Look, more power to you.” It was so funny because the way he approached it was like, “Well, I have an idea of a theme for the whole magazine,” and so he just did illustrations based on whatever, and none of them matched the article in any sort of real way. I’m telling him like, “You should probably try to make sure that the images match what the article is about. You drew a polar bear. This article has nothing to do with polar bears. What’s the connection for the reader to look at this?” He’s like, “Oh, well, the connection is winter because we’re publishing the magazine in the winter.” I’m like, “Huh. No, no.” That doesn’t make any-

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, that’s sounds like a little bit of a stretch, but you know, I feel it, I feel it, I feel it.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, that’s one of us that feels it. I mean, eventually we ended up sort of just going with the concept because we didn’t have enough time, but for the second issue, the pieces fit the article more and I told him like, “Look, read the article and then get started with designing.” He would just start designing and be like, “Oh, I have to read the article?” I’m like, “Yes, it would help. It would be helpful so at least what you’re designing matches that in some capacity.” So…

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah yeah. You got to read the article.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Akeem Roberts:
You got to.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, how do you approach storytelling through your art? I’m pretty sure it’s more than just like in, say, the book illustration example, it’s more than just reading. How do you really approach telling a story through your art?

Akeem Roberts:
I would read it and then I would like try to imagine it in my head and say, for instance, for the J.D.the Kid Barber series that I did, for that it was reading it, and then the art director would kind of tell me what they imagined in it. They were like, “Oh, this character is in their room,” but it’s up to me to add anything else that I wanted to add into it, so I would just try and look up Google images basically to find what I imagined this school look like because references, it’s always great to have. I know sometimes it’s like, especially when you’re starting out, you want to not use any references. You’re like, “I can do this from my head.” You can’t. I mean, you can, but you’ll miss the small details that you want to have caught if you weren’t looking at a reference. I would look at reference, kind of imagine the area, and then just try to imagine the characters just living and breathing.

For some of them I would add even like small jokes. One of the illustrations, the art director was, “Oh, he’s losing this battle, but everyone has numbers up saying 10 for this guy who’s winning.” Then, for one of those, I drew his friend in there giving him a thumbs up with like a two, so everyone has a good rating except he has a bad rating for the guy, and he’s got a thumbs up giving it to the guy being like, “Don’t worry, I got your back.” I try to put in little jokes like that inside the book so kids will see it and notice it. I’m trying to always make an illustration for, I guess, like the younger me if I was reading it as a kid.

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm. Do you try to add a little something that’s just unique to you in each image that you do?

Akeem Roberts:
If I do try to add anything, I try to add humor. I feel like that’s my go-to form of communicating is trying to add a joke if I can.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, we’ve had a few New Yorker illustrators on the show before, most recently, Liz Montague. I’m curious, how did you get started with doing illustrations for The New Yorker?

Akeem Roberts:
I feel like my story is very unique. I have yet to hear anyone else who’s had this experience.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Akeem Roberts:
Basically I was like tabling at this convention in New York called Mocha Fest, which is like an art festival, and I had a bunch of comics that I had done online and this little short story that I did that was in black and white. After that weekend, I got a message from Emma who’s like the Editor at New Yorker. She was, “Oh, do you want to do a daily shouts?” Basically like, “I like your work, and I was wondering if you want to try to submit some jokes or a daily shout or anything like that.”

I was like, “All right,” and then I sent my first batch, and then after that Friday after I sent it they were like, “Oh yeah, this one is in.” I sold one the very first time I tried, which was crazy good. I don’t know anyone else who’s done that. Maybe other people have, but I had sold it first immediately. Then, the next week, I also submitted some batches and I also sold another one, so I was feeling really good. I was like, “All right, I can do this,” and then after that, it was 40 weeks of like not selling anything.

Maurice Cherry:
Is that usually like the… You said that was sort of unique to you. I’m just curious, what would a cartoonist normally do if they’re trying to get into like The New Yorker? Is there a more-

Akeem Roberts:
Right.

Maurice Cherry:
… typical process?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, there’s like submissions that you can do on the website, and you can send them batches that way. Then, they’ll say, “You’ve made it,” and then you’ll get Emma’s email, so you can start sending batches to her directly. Sort of like a filtering process before you get her email, but I just got it immediately and then got one in immediately, which felt good. Then after that, it slowed down a bit, obviously.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, you’re still doing it now, so, I mean, it obviously worked out in your favor.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Is there a particular style that you think, I guess… I guess it probably varies per publication, but for The New Yorker, and not to harp on them specifically, but is there a particular style that you think they’re looking for?

Akeem Roberts:
For The New Yorker, I think they’re looking kind of for something that is sketchy and has detail, but not too much. Nothing that will distract from the joke.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Akeem Roberts:
Basically just like if you had to jot down a joke with stick figures in five minutes, that’s kind of the ideal I think like they want in terms of detail is just not enough stuff that will distract from it. Then, they definitely don’t want it too cartoony, which is like I always put my stuff, and maybe sometimes it’s too cartoony, but there’s a line where you’re trying to hit where it’s not cartoony in the sense that it feels like on a Saturday morning cartoon, but also not cartoony in the way that it feels like it’s Family Guy. You got to hit a perfect, unique just like sketch style that takes a lot of work, but looks simple.

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm. I get what you’re saying. I get what you’re saying. Certainly, nothing that’s like, I don’t know, Marvel style, like not a comic kind of thing, but you also-

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
… want it to have some level of expression and polish, as you would say, that doesn’t detract from the joke.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, you’ve worked with some other big clients as well, Boom! Studios. You mentioned Men’s Health earlier, Conde Nast, which is over a bunch of different magazines and such. Is it easier working with bigger clients like those than, say, smaller clients?

Akeem Roberts:
For sure. I feel like bigger clients, they kind of have an idea and they kind of let you be free, especially if they know your work. They’ll be like, “All right, I saw your work. I kind of imagine what you can do. If you’ll do that, we’ll be great.” I feel like when it comes to mom and pop type of clients, it’s a little less freeing for the artists in a sense because I guess the dollar value that they’re spending is… it’s precious, their $500 or whatever.

This thing that you’re doing for them, especially if it’s like a logo or anything that they’re going to use over again for t-shirts, it’s very important. Because of that and because of how important it is to them, they’re sometimes a little overbearing. They’ll overwork in illustration because of having multiple revisions that kind of the artist loses… The more revisions that’s happening, the artist kind of loses the spirit sometimes. If it’s 20 revisions to get this logo done, the artist each time is less and less into it-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Akeem Roberts:
… and that doesn’t mean that there will be a point where they don’t care. The artist is always going to care because it’s for their portfolio and their job. They want it to be good. It’s kind of like a way of the artist helping… not helping themselves, but guarding themselves from being like… If you’re too personally attached, you’ll get upset about the notes-

Maurice Cherry:
Right.

Akeem Roberts:
… so you have to be removed. The more and more you get notes, the more and more you’re like, “All right, this is getting away from my vision and I’m trying to see if I can get exactly what they’re seeing in their head,” which is not normally something an artist can reproduce is what another person is envisioning.

Maurice Cherry:
I feel like if I had to do 20 revisions on a design, I would want to fire the client. To me, that feels like the client really doesn’t know what they want, and they feel like you’re just going to keep iterating on it until it magically appears to them. I mean, I know that’s how we’re sort of just pulling that number out of anywhere, but I get what you’re saying about the dollar value, which I think is something that’s really important. A lot of these bigger companies just have the budget to be able to do bigger type projects, more audacious ideas, et cetera, but then smaller clients, that money has to really go far. That’s not to say that larger clients aren’t as invested in the end project, but it just takes on… There’s an added gravity to it when it’s from a smaller client or for a smaller client, I should say.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Can you discuss any upcoming projects or collabs that you’re excited about?

Akeem Roberts:
Right now, I don’t really have anything coming up. I guess the only thing I have is I’m working on a graphic novel and I’m trying to pitch to HarperCollins or Kokila to just get the story that I have in my head off the ground.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. I’ve always wanted to do a graphic novel. I cannot draw, but I have had ideas for characters in my head since I was a teenager to put into a graphic novel. I’ve talked about it here on the show before. People probably already know this, but one day I’m going to have the time and the funds to make it happen, so I hope it works out for you.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah. I’m hoping it works out, too.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, I want to get more into your work and your career, but let’s learn more about Akeem. Let’s learn more about you. Are you originally from New York?

Akeem Roberts:
No, I am kind of like from everywhere is what I tell everyone. I was born in North Dakota and my Mom was in the military, so I moved around a lot from North Dakota to Alabama, to Germany, to South Carolina, to Texas, to Maryland, to New York. A lot of places, but most of my time was in the South, so I guess I could just say I’m from the South.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. Did you do a lot of drawing growing up?

Akeem Roberts:
Yes. I would just say that I started drawing… There’s two big reasons I started drawing, so first I was just doodling, and then in third grade, I won an award for the state in South Carolina, third place for this painting I did-

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm.

Akeem Roberts:
… and that was a good boost. I was like, “Oh, wow, this is cool. I can draw.” I didn’t really think of anything of it. I was just like, “All right, I can doodle.” Then, in fifth grade, there was this girl that could draw way better than me. I was crushing, so then I would try to get better to impress her, and I think that’s kind of my origin story is trying to get better to impress a girl. Then, I just kept drawing on my own.

Maurice Cherry:
Did it work?

Akeem Roberts:
It did not work, you know? So-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh.

Akeem Roberts:
… ultimately it was for me, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
I had someone on the show a couple episodes ago, Kendell Burton, and he was telling me how he first… He’s an art director now, but he was like, “Oh yeah, I first got into design in the web because I was making a blog on Zynga to try to meet girls.” I’m like, “Does that work?”

Akeem Roberts:
Never does.

Maurice Cherry:
You were doing a lot of drawing and stuff growing up, and I see you went to the University of South Carolina and majored in Media Arts. Tell me about that time. What was that like?

Akeem Roberts:
Media Arts, basically, I ended up there because I was very late at applying for colleges, and my family had just moved back to South Carolina, so then I just applied there. This guy that I met with was like, “Oh, tell me what you want to do.: I was telling him that I probably would want to do some animation, like comics and stuff, and so he was… The Media Arts Program, which is basically teaching you how to use the Adobe Suite while learning about film, photography, script writing, and so it was like mostly on the film and photography side. Then, I minored in Illustration, so I did like one figure drawing class on my senior year and one illustration class on my senior year.

Maurice Cherry:
Do you feel like they really kind of prepared you as an artist?

Akeem Roberts:
I feel like not in a sense of what I ideally wanted to do, which was basically do animation and stuff like that. I didn’t have a student film. I didn’t even take the animation course because I never signed up in time, but I guess overall, it kind of helped me be a jack-of-all-trade because certain things with film and photography and script writing can transfer into illustration. Having that does help me visualize ideas, but not necessarily in the sense of, “Okay, you do this something. You’ll have a job immediately after.” You know?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, I think school is interesting in that way. I mean, I majored in Math, so I didn’t think-

Akeem Roberts:
Oh no.

Maurice Cherry:
… when I was graduating I was going to have… Actually, no. I mean, I did major in Math, that’s true, but I had like a scholarship thing lined up with the program that I was in that I was going to work for the government after I graduated. Then, that fell through like junior year because of 9/11. It fell through. I was like, “Oh, I have no plans for what I’m going to do when I graduate.” I was working part time at the Symphony here in Atlanta selling tickets, and I did that, I think… I did that up till I graduated, and I remember when I graduated they took the calculator away from my kiosk because they were like, “Well, you have a math degree now. You don’t need this.” I’m like, “Is that supposed to be funny?”

I mean, I didn’t need it, but I didn’t have any sort of career plans lined up after graduation because I thought I was set. I really didn’t even pursue other companies. I snuck my resume into other departments’ resume books so I could get interviews at places. I was wholly unprepared going into senior year for any kind of actual career goals. I was in college just because I was a nerd that liked math.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah. That actually sounds very familiar to my story. That’s basically kind of like how I ended up in New York was my friend got me an internship in New York, and then I did that internship for the summer, but it kind of fell through near the end. Then, I was working at Starbucks in South Carolina. I was making $9 an hour, but the rent was just so much. Most of my money was going towards the rent-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Akeem Roberts:
… and then it was like… I think the rent was… I want to say almost like 600, almost 800, which is a lot. Then, they were like, “Oh, you could transfer to the Starbucks in New York,” which I transferred and I was making like 13. Then, the apartment I had up here was 584 with everything included, so I was way better off staying in New York, and that’s just like how I got here was not planning on staying. I came up for an internship and I was like, “All right, I’m just going to go back,” but then it just seemed to work out better for me to just live here than be in South Carolina barely making it-

Maurice Cherry:
I mean-

Akeem Roberts:
… you know?

Maurice Cherry:
… that makes sense, and I would say also probably as an artist, I mean, you kind of want to be in the cultural capital of the country when it comes to experiences and stuff. I would imagine you probably wouldn’t have access to the same level of experiences in South Carolina that you would in New York City, you know?

Akeem Roberts:
I mean, I feel like… Okay, so when I was going to college, there was this rumor that actually a bunch of comic artists actually lives in South Carolina, which might be true, but I just never met anyone.

Maurice Cherry:
If I recall, and this was years ago when I interviewed him, Sanford Greene, who’s like, I know he’s done stuff for Marvel, for DC, pretty prolific visual artist, lives in South Carolina. He lives in South Carolina.

Akeem Roberts:
Oh really?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, he went to Benedict’s.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yep.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, so like yeah, I guess… Look, I guess South Carolina is the home for the comic artist, but I just could not find that community at all, but comic artists tend to be homebodies, so you would never really see them.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, I’d imagine, yeah, it’s probably not… There’s no collective or something like that. I would say it’s probably just easier in New York because of availability and just the cultural atmosphere of the city. I came from a small town in Alabama, and if I would’ve stayed there after I graduated high school, I’d know I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now because there was no kind of technology or design or anything. You either got married, got into the church, or maybe worked a factory job. Not a lot of options.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, that’s not endemic of the South, but just in particular, like-

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah [inaudible 00:30:14].

Maurice Cherry:
… your environment can help out, you know?

Akeem Roberts:
No, no, I hear you. I have a bunch of family from Alabama.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. One of your early career gigs, you were at this place called ideaMACHINE Studio where you worked as an animator. Talk to me about that.

Akeem Roberts:
All right, so crazy with that was one of my friends came up and he was doing photography. I was still working at Starbucks at this time, and he was like, “Oh, there’s an animation studio just like here. Do you want to apply?” I was like, “All right, cool.” We possibly could work in the same building, whatever, so I applied. Then, I got the job, and then that same day my friend got fired from whatever company he was working at in the building, so it’s like we didn’t get to work together, but he did help me get this job by seeing it. Then, at that same time, I was still working at Starbucks, which I worked that job while also doing Starbucks for like a year and a half just doing both of them.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, and at Starbucks, I had just became a shift manager. I would only work two or three days a week, but it was weird because I’d be in charge then, so it’s like…

Maurice Cherry:
You were able to kind of juggle it sounds like.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah. I was able to juggle it, but it was surreal once I think about it, just like how many hours I was working. It was a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
How was ideaMACHINE Studio? Was that kind of your first studio experience?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, that was my first studio experience. That one, it was a little more… I guess in a sense it kind of trained me, kind of gave me the animation class kind of a sense because I went in there knowing some stuff, but not really knowing the 12 principles of animation or anything like that, just what I saw online. Most of the stuff that I did for them was kind of like whiteboard explainer videos.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay.

Akeem Roberts:
It was like for pharmaceutical companies that had this idea, but wanted it to be explained in a simply way. That’s what we did for them. There was tiny stuff that you can animate, and then I would push it every once in a while to try and get better at my animation chops and my graphic design skills. I guess in a sense that job kind of trained me, but it was very reluctantly because the guy who runs the company was… I was trying to get better at art, and he was like, “You don’t need to get better at drawing.” I was like, “Yes, I do.” Then, I just kept pushing and doing my web comic on the side was also something I did. Just work on my skills and progress my abilities to draw and stuff like that. Was just doing that weekly in order to force myself to put something out consistently and have a foundation.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, so you were doing this kind of freelance work or doing your own work at least as well as doing this nine-to-five. How did you balance that?

Akeem Roberts:
I did not sleep a lot is how I balanced that. Basically, I would work during the day. If I had a Starbucks shift, maybe it was two or three hours, so I’d work nine to five, and then I would walk over to the Starbucks. I just happened to be super close to this company and then work four hours there and then come back home, which the commute was good. It was like 30 minutes, not that bad, especially for New York, and then work on my freelance stuff. Then that started again in the morning. It was a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s amazing the stuff that we pull off when we’re younger just to try to get that… I don’t know, I guess you just have all that youthful energy. You can get it done. Nowadays, absolutely not. I’m in bed-

Akeem Roberts:
I-

Maurice Cherry:
… at a certain hour. I not staying up pulling all-nighters anymore. No, I get what you’re saying. It takes a lot to try to make sure you’re doing all of these things because, of course, you’re doing what you have to do to pay your bills and whatever, but you’re also establishing yourself during this time doing your own thing, which I think is super important. It’s something I tell a lot of designers that come on the show, especially ones that just start off, like have something on the side that’s just your own thing, you know?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
You can still do what you have to do to get involved with your career at your workplace, but have something that’s just yours.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, after you worked at ideaMACHINE, you ended up at another studio called Holler where you were their Associate Animation Director. Was that a big shift from your work at ideaMACHINE?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, that was a big shift. One of the main things that like… The reason I left ideaMACHINE was first I wanted to grow as an artist, and then the second thing was that they were in Brooklyn, and then they were moving the company to New Jersey. I was… I don’t want to step foot in New Jersey, no offense to New Jersey, but I was just like, “I live in Brooklyn. The commute is crazy. Getting on the path just to get there, I absolutely can’t do it.” This is around the same time that The New Yorker reached out to me, and then this company reached out to me and they were like, “Hey, do you want to do a test for us?” I did a test for them. I had my Cintiq and everything all set up, and then my Cintiq broke that weekend-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh.

Akeem Roberts:
… and I had to use the Bamboo, which is kind of like is still a drawing tablet, but just doesn’t have a screen. I had to use my Bamboo tablet and finish that animation for them, which is a quick reaction GIF that was like three seconds long. I did that over the weekend and they liked it.

Then, I started working there and the culture was very different. ideaMACHINE’s culture was kind of like you were doing like a student project. You would have art director… They would like help you, but not with any direction. The art direction was purely up to the animator. The way that it looked was purely up to the animator. The client would give notes, but it wasn’t like I had to follow a guide. I was the guide. It was like everything I did at ideaMACHINE from like the music to audio, sound effects and all of that compositing, there we did… It was a one-shop stop for one artist on each video. It wasn’t like working as a team really. It was kind of one guy is doing this, and if they need help with the animation, they’ll ask you, but it wasn’t anything that was ever felt like a cohesive team effort where everyone is trying to draw in the same style or anything like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm, so it seems like it was definitely just a ramp-up in terms of responsibility, though, right?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah, so for Holler, when I first started, I was just doing little three-second GIFs and there’ll be client stuff, and then we’ll work on those. Then, later on, I started directing some shorts that they did right before I left. There was one called Akemi-chan: Is It Magical?, which is an idea that I had which was like a play on Magical School Girls trying to do a bunch of anime inside jokes kind of stuff like that. I was writing the script for that and then guiding the people that was working with me of how I wanted it to look and fleshing out storyboards and having more of a commanding role, which felt good, which kind of led to my newest role is sort of still doing that. It was kind of a stepping stone of becoming in charge, taking a step back and letting people do their things, but also helping them grow.

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm. I would imagine even with that, it’s sort of helping you out in your freelance because you were still freelancing also during this time with Holler?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. With Holler, I was still freelancing. Like the beginning of 2020, like in January 2020, I got a call from Kokila being like, “Hey, do you want to work on this book?” I was like, “This name looks familiar.” I was looking at the art director’s name, and then I looked it up and it was the same art director for Hair Love, which I loved Hair Love. It was great. They’d just had that short come out. It was beautiful with Matthew A. Cherry. I was, “Wow, I would love to work with them.” I reached out to them and I was getting started. I was like, “Man, I don’t know how I’m going to do this with the commute, but I’m going to try and make it happen.” Then, of course, the pandemic happened, so it made it a little easier for me to finish my day job and then jump straight to my freelance. From there, every day I was doing illustrations from like 9:30 at night to like 2:00 in the morning-

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Akeem Roberts:
… just to get those things done, and it was a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, but I mean, I would imagine it changed the way you work freelance, right?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Freelance before I felt was more if I felt like I had the energy to do it, I’d do it-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Akeem Roberts:
… but with the book, it was like, “All right, you got to get these pages done. You got to get these multiple books done. You kind of have to treat this now like a full-time job where you clock in.” I was like, “All right, my clock-in time is 9:30 at night to 2:00 in the morning.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah, that’s good. You get into doing it, you kind of time box your schedule, it sort of helps out, especially if you’re doing it on a regular basis.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, something that I’ve seen at least over the past decade that I’ve done this show, but I’d say probably prior to that as well, you started to see a really big increase of Black artistic talent, visual artistic talent specifically. Cartoons, animations, fine art, like you mentioned Hair Love from Matthew A. Cherry. No relation, I think, I think. Any genealogists out there want to dive into that, I’m more than welcome.

When I see all of this, I also end up seeing this question about representation, like that always seems to come up, which I think is kind unfair that if you are a Black artist that you have to represent your community through your work. I think it’s up to the individual artist what they choose to do. Is that something that you feel like you have to do through your work? Have you gotten that kind of, I don’t know, sense of… I don’t even want to say responsibility, but have you gotten that, say, from other people, from clients, et cetera?

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, I would say there’s a little bit of that, and there’s like, for instance, when I first started at Holler, I was one of the only two black people there that was the artist and black people in general. One of the things I did when I started there was like I didn’t want to get pigeonholed as the guy who you only come to for Black stuff, right?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Akeem Roberts:
That I immediately just did not draw. I drew like animal characters that I knew were Black or like Mother Earth was a character that had an Afro, but I knew she was Black, but it was like I didn’t do anything that was explicitly Black because I didn’t want to get pigeonholed. With my comic stuff, it’s slice of life, but there are times that I do stuff that is political, but those are very few and far between. Then, my main stance on that is just I want my web comic to… There’s a bunch of web comics out there where it’s just nothing really happens. It’s just like couples chilling and that’s it.

I was like, “This web comic, I’m doing it to show that Black people are normal. This is my every day. This is slice of life. There’s like nothing big going on. No overarching villain. This is just a Black guy chilling. Here’s a look into this. It’s not what you normally expect.” I feel like there’s that, and then sometimes if there’s bigger issues, I’ll just bleed over. Then, I’m just like, “I have to address this.” I will-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Akeem Roberts:
… but most of it I’m just the way that I’m thinking of representation is just like, “Hey, I’m just a normal guy on the internet. This is what a normal Black dude is doing-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Akeem Roberts:
… you know? Chilling.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I like that, and I’m glad you sort of framed it in that way. You know, it’s interesting, even after doing this show for as long as I’ve done it, people will only think Black designers come in one specific type. I mean, that can be whatever that type is what that type is, but I say that to say that there’s a lot of variety in what people might think might just be a monolithic set. One thing I’ve tried to do with the show is like, yeah, I have designers, but I’ve got cartoons and illustrators. I’ve had footwear designers on the show. I’ve had software developers on the show. I try to make it pretty diverse in general just to give a sense of what we’re doing out here in terms of creativity in this kind of digital age. I’m glad that you framed it in that way. I think that’s a really good way to look at it.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, that was also one of the things when I did the J.D. the Kid Barber books was the reason I worked so many hours on it was because I really wanted the illustrations to have like an angelic feel or like magical feeling, and to have there be depth in the Black character’s skin, so it wasn’t just a gray tone because it was on black and white, but it wasn’t just a gray tone for the skin and no light. I made sure that there was an airbrush. I showed the details of Black skin so when a Black kid opens it up, they’re like, “Oh, my skin is beautiful.” I made sure the skin popped, and that’s what I was like… That was another way of what I was thinking of representation, but not in the sense of, “Oh, this stands for something,” but just in a subtle way of like a kid opening a book and seeing that Black is beautiful.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Who are some artists or illustrators that have influenced your work?

Akeem Roberts:
I got the classic Calvin and Hobbes. Loved the Garfield. Loved Boondocks. Maybe it wasn’t age-appropriate for me to be watching it when I was, but I did love The Boondocks. Strong anime influence. Just a bunch of stuff. Even speaking of The Boondocks, when I was in college, I think this guy is named Carl Jones. He worked on The Boondocks.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah. He was in Columbia, South Carolina, for something. I don’t know what he was there for, and he saw my sketchbook. He was like, “Oh, let me look at this.” Then, he looked at it and he was like, “You got some good ideas here, but you really need to work on your fundamentals.” From there, I just started working on my fundamentals like crazy, which I reached out to him and I told him that and he was like, “Wow.” Then, that was it, That was the last we talked, but he was like, “Wow, thanks.” Then, he started following me on Instagram and I as like, “All right, cool.”

Maurice Cherry:
No, that’s so interesting. Early… I wouldn’t even say… This wasn’t even in my career, and I keep sort of making these parallels because you’re saying some things that line up directly with some experiences that I’ve had. This was the year, God, I sound so old. This was like 2000 I want to say, ’99, 2000 maybe, but I was palling around on the internet. This was back when Yahoo used to be a big destination on the web for a lot of people.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
It had chat, it had games. I mean, ask any elder Millennial about Yahoo Spades, and they will spin you a tale, okay. Yahoo had a lot of these user groups that you could just join or whatever. Very similar to like, I guess, a forum or something like that. They had one around Black comic books that was just called like Black Comics. When I tell you the crรจme de la crรจme of Black artists at the time were in there, I’m talking Denys Cowan, I’m talking Dwayne McDuffie. Dwayne McDuffie-

Akeem Roberts:
Oh wow.

Maurice Cherry:
… actually gave me a critique on a comic book idea that I had. I was like, “Yeah, I want to make this comic book about these like… They’re ninjas, but they’re Black, and I’m going to call it Black Ninjas.” I mean, I can laugh about it now. This is terrible. He’s like, “This is just-

Akeem Roberts:
Oh no.

Maurice Cherry:
… “you’ve just taken Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” which I love, “you’ve just taken Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and mapped their direct characteristics onto Black people.” He’s like, “If you want to make something that’s your own, you really have to make it your own. You can’t just copy from what someone else has done.”

That has stuck with me. I mean, I’ve certainly taken that advice with other projects and things that I’ve done, but this was way back in the day. It’s amazing how even just like those kind of little comments that you get from someone that has been where you’re trying to go can help just set you in the right direction, that kind of indirect mentorship in a way.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to any aspiring artists out there that are just starting out in the industry? What would you tell them?

Akeem Roberts:
Work on your fundamentals, but also when you’re doing contracts, there’s a couple of things you need to make sure you have, which is a kill fee. If you finish an illustration, no matter how much percentage of it, they’ll still pay you what they said they’ll pay you. That way, even if they’re like, “Oh, you finished this illustration,” and then they’re like, “Actually, we don’t want to do the project anymore,” if you have a kill fee, that would be like, “Hey, I finished a hundred percent of this project. Pay me a hundred percent of the project.” No matter what, they still have to pay, which is important.

Then, make sure you have a limited number of revisions. I like to do three revisions, and then if a client goes over that, they pay for that, so like you get these three revisions, then anything else they pay for it. That allows the client to think about it because I feel like if it’s unlimited revisions, the client is just going to keep being like, “Oh, what if this was pink? What if this was blue? What is this was orange?” If you’re just like, “Hey, you have three revisions,” that kind of nit-picky stuff with the client they’re not going to do because they’re like, “Okay, these are important. Let me actually think about it.” Like, “Oh, can I just imagine that color in blue or whatever versus asking the illustrator or artist to do it for them.”

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Akeem Roberts:
Then, after that, I would say also save 30% of whatever you get for freelance for taxes because you do not want to get caught with your pants down.

Maurice Cherry:
Are you speaking from personal experience there?

Akeem Roberts:
No, I was able to catch it. I didn’t let that happen to me, but I’m always worried. I’m always trying to save just in case. I don’t want to end up having to pay too much in taxes and don’t have any money in my account.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a good idea. That’s a good idea. How do you stay inspired and motivated in what you do? I’m curious. How do you handle burnout or any sort of periods of low motivation? How do you get through that?

Akeem Roberts:
That, I feel like whenever I’m in a funk, especially when I’m drawing stuff, I kind of just doodle a comfort character, which for me is like I love Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic 1 was like one of the first games I ever played. I always draw Sonic, and it helps me get out of the funk because I feel like the funk you’re usually in is just because you’re progressing in your mind, but you haven’t kind of caught up to your hand yet. You’re like, “Oh, this is looking bad,” because I know my taste is a lot better in my head and I can visualize it, but I’m like my mind, my body hasn’t quite gotten there yet. I feel like if you have a comfort character that kind of helps you put things in perspective, I guess.

For me, it’s Sonic, which whenever I’m feeling out of it, I’ll just doodle a little Sonic and I’ll be like, “Hey, this was better than what I did before. That keeps me motivated, and I always try to measure myself only to myself. Yeah, there’s going to be artists and stuff that you look up to, but make sure you just look at how you are progressing so that way you don’t lose motivation and drawing. If you’re drawing and then you see another person who just draws something straight out of the air and it’s perfect and beautiful and you’re like, “Man, I can’t do that,” you just got to like slowly keep working. Just look at yourself and be like, “Hey, I’m slightly better than what I was the other day,” and just keep going.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Akeem Roberts:
I’d love to have this graphic novel come out and then continue doing stuff in publishing, because right now my job is designing book covers-

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm.

Akeem Roberts:
… so I don’t do the illustration or anything in that. I just do the layout, the fonts and everything-

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Akeem Roberts:
… and I feel like that has been a little freeing in order to look at the process, but also pick other artists that will be good for a work or a job or something like that. I guess I give them the opportunity to show themselves.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I think designing book cover certainly is a…that seems pretty cool. I’ve seen awards go to just book covers in terms of design and everything, so that’s a pretty cool gig to have.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah, yeah. I’m liking it so far. Only three weeks in, though, but it’s good right now.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work and everything? Where can they find that online?

Akeem Roberts:
You can find out more about at akeemteam.com and everything pretty much at Akeem Team, which ironically, that is just like an AIM username I made back up in middle school and I just kept it,

Maurice Cherry:
Now, it’s yours. It’s yours forever.

Akeem Roberts:
Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
All right, sounds good, man. Akeem Roberts, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. Thank you for, I think, demystifying a little bit about what it’s like to be a working freelance artist. I think what’s probably the most important thing that I gathered just from this conversation and from your story is that this wasn’t an overnight success. You always sort of had this gift for drawing, and then you cultivated that through college and then through your additional work experiences. Then, you were also freelancing and now you’re doing cartoons in The New Yorker and you’re designing book covers and stuff like that.

It’s all a process, like you’ve managed to continue to build your skills up at every step of the way, and I think that’s something that for most people, particularly for most people I think that are listening, it’s just an important thing to know that success doesn’t come overnight. You’ve really kind of worked hard to make a name for yourself. I’m excited to see what else comes out from you in the future, so thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Akeem Roberts:
Hey, thank you so much for having me, man.

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Liz Montague

If you’ve been a regular reader of The New Yorker magazine, then you may already be familiar with this week’s guest, Liz Montague. (But if you’re not, then this conversation is a perfect introduction!) Liz is the first Black woman to have a cartoon featured in The New Yorker, and now she’s an author with her first book set to hit bookstores everywhere in the Fall. Everything’s coming up Liz!

Our conversation begin with a quick life update, and from there Liz talked about starting her comic “Liz at Large” as a college student. She also talked about how she began contributing to The New Yorker, and spoke about representation, how that’s reflected in her work, and her future books (plural!) that are on the way. Liz is proof that self-determination and hard work definitely pay off in the future!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Liz Montague:
Hi, my name is Liz Montague, and I’m an author, illustrator and cartoonist.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, before we get more into learning about your work and about your journey as an author/illustrator/cartoonist, tell me, how has this year been going for you so far?

Liz Montague:
This has actually been a really good year. I mean, I think personally, it’s been really good year. I just got married. I just bought a house.

Maurice Cherry:
Congratulations.

Liz Montague:
Thank you. In a personal and material way, I guess it’s been super good. I mean, professionally it’s been really good, too. It’s been my first year working on book projects, which is very new for me, having come from the news media world. It was a very tumultuous past few years for everybody, and being on the news side of that was really exhausting. So I think this has been a really calm year, I’d say

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. I mean, I guess as calm as getting married and also moving into a new house. I’d imagine there’s probably been some stress around that, even just with the pandemic and everything.

Liz Montague:
I mean, it’s less stressful than covering the Trump presidency and 2020, COVID, all of that and trying to do it in record time with deadlines and everything. That was way more stressful than this, 100%.

Maurice Cherry:
Fair. I get that, totally. I totally do. What lessons did you learn over this past year? How would you say you’ve grown and improved?

Liz Montague:
I would say that I prioritized just my mental health. I feel like everyone’s saying that and that people say it so much, it starts to not mean anything. This is the first year I really started saying no to things. And that’s been kind of scary, but empowering, but also terrifying. I don’t know. I’m still learning.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I mean, I think that’s something that a lot of people are still learning, is to say no. I think the pandemic, of course, forced everyone to not just slow down, but in many cases to just stop.

Maurice Cherry:
And now that we’re at this point, though we’re not completely out of the pandemic, we’re at this point where restrictions are being lifted and rates have gone down to a point where we now have to try to come out of this period with some new normal. And what this time has forced everyone to do is just sort of reevaluate their commitment to work, their commitment to being busy and all that sort of stuff.

Liz Montague:
Yeah. And the pandemic and the pause that it caused happened at such a weird time in my life where I was 24, and I’d already been working at The New Yorker for two years and had been doing this work for about two years. And now where we’re at now, I’m 26 and I’m trying to really figure out, “Holy crap, what do I want to be when I grow up?” And I didn’t expect that question to scare me so much. It’s terrifying.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I mean, in your 20s, it is a scary thing. Especially, God, I’m thinking even now with everything that’s happening right now, it can be hard to think about, “What does a future look like?” I totally understand that.

Liz Montague:
Yeah. Thoughts around that right now is just like, “Okay, so I’m done, what do I want to keep doing? What new things do I want to do? What do I want to try? Is there still time to try things and be bad at them and new at them? Or am I at a point where I’m just supposed to try things and automatically be good, because that’s what people might expect?”

Maurice Cherry:
I’ll say with you being in your 20s, you totally have the time to try and fail at stuff. The 20s are for that, the 20s are your time to do that. Your 30s are sort of your time to sort of refine the process. And then hopefully by your 40s, you have it figured out. I’m saying this now because I just turned 41 recently. But you hope to have it figured out by that point.

Liz Montague:
[crosstalk 00:06:02].

Maurice Cherry:
But I can definitely say in hindsight, in your 20s, that’s the time to… I don’t want to say make those mistakes, but that’s the time where you can sort of have those errors and it doesn’t affect you long-term into the future, that kind of thing.

Liz Montague:
Everything feels like you’re one wrong move away from crumbling it all. But I know that that’s not actually true. Even if it feels like it’s true.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s go ahead and jump into Liz at Large. For those listening who for some reason have never heard of Liz at Large, can you give an introduction?

Liz Montague:
Liz at Large is a single panel cartoon series that I actually started my sophomore year of college. I was just trying to sort out my own mind to myself. And I just kind of started drawing these cartoons where my dog, my childhood dog, to me would give me advice.

Liz Montague:
And it just started as a super casual thing that I would post on Instagram. And my teammates, because I was on the track and field team in college, would be like, “Oh my God, I love that cartoon. Where’s the next one?” And they would really kind of just hold me accountable to just keep doing it. And I just really just stuck with it.

Liz Montague:
And then eventually after I was out of college, I was working as a graphic designer. I was already working for The New Yorker at the time. I was able to make it into a single panel cartoon into the Washington City Paper, which was a lot of fun.

Liz Montague:
But then it’s a different ballgame once you have deadlines and you need to worry about, “Well, how is this going to print?” And the kind of evergreen nature that it needed to be, because when the deadline is versus when it would print was two weeks apart. So it’s really kind of grown and shifted with me, which is kind of cool to have that to look back on and know where I was mentally when I made it. So yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I was going to ask, have there been new changes and things that you have introduced to the comic as your life has gone on?

Liz Montague:
Stylistically it’s changed a bit, where I think it got a little bit more fluid as time went on. When I look at the old versions of it and old cartoons of it, it feels very rigid, like I was really afraid of messing up. And then as time went on, I think it got a little bit looser. I think I was willing to kind of play around with environments more.

Liz Montague:
And then it changed even more once it was in the Washington City Paper, because then it’s like, “Okay, there’s a deadline. Okay, there’s an audience that’s actually going to see this.” As opposed to, the internet is kind of a black hole. You’re kind of, sort of thinking of an audience, but you’re not really thinking about, “Oh wow, someone’s going to tangibly hold this in their hand.” And that tangibility kind of made me a bit more nervous.

Liz Montague:
And then I think that the content of it kind of had to zoom out a lot more. Again, because there was that two week period versus when it was due and when it would print. For a daily, local newspaper, you don’t know what could be going on in the world at that time. And then what ended up going on in the world at that time was the Trump presidency and eventually COVID, and we were in the middle of Washington DC. So it was big news there.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I was going to say, I’m thinking during that time, I can imagine everything during that time was about voting, the presidency. Yeah, I could see in DC how that would be really… Well, I’m curious. Knowing that stuff was going on as you were doing the comic, did you sort of feel a need to speak to the times in that sort of way?

Liz Montague:
I mean, it was almost impossible for me to be super responsive in the way that I would be for a New Yorker daily cartoon or something just because I knew, like, “Okay, by the time that this is actually printed a week or two from now, there could be a whole new thing. There could be a whole new something else going on.” I actually ended up zooming in to my own life and making it hyperspecific to whatever I needed to hear, and then just hoping that it would work out for whenever it was printed.

Maurice Cherry:
I think that’s probably a really good strategy too, I mean, to just make it more focused on you. I mean, it is called Liz at Large, it’s not World at Large.

Liz Montague:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
So it makes sense to focus it on you and your life as opposed to trying to make it some sort of regular bulletin about what’s happening in the world.

Liz Montague:
[inaudible 00:10:09] sure, and there was already enough of that. And I was like, “You know what? This isn’t for that. So I’m going to just do it.”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. To that ends, what was the feeling that you wanted to really capture with Liz at Large?

Liz Montague:
When I first started, it was really just for fun. Just to see what my friends would say, what I would say. But I think as I continued doing it, I realized that the power that emotional literacy could have of just taking a second to stop and think, and think about how you feel. Think about what you need to hear, what I needed to hear and taking the time to write that down, and that could actually have a profound effect on your life.

Liz Montague:
And I think that that kind of really became a big why for me, as far as just emotional literacy matters, the way that especially in… It’s always weird to speak on the Black community, but it’s like how in the Black community, emotional literacy talking about your feelings, addressing your feelings is kind of just an issue that really needs to be sorted out. And how it could just make everything so much better if we just stopped and felt and processed. And I don’t know, just the impact that it have. I hope that made sense.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. No, it made sense. I think if that’s something people can grasp from the comic, particularly from a single panel comic, I think that’s really powerful. To that end, there’s so much about Black people that’s reflected through not just the media, but through different types of media, through cartoons, through movies, et cetera. And so if you’re able to not only make it hyperspecific to your life, but then also try to make it unique to the quote/unquote “Black experience,” which is such a varied, vast concept, it’s impossible to do that.

Liz Montague:
I worked in nonprofit at the time. I was a graphic designer at a nonprofit when I lived in DC. And I remember I read research on the racial empathy gap. And about how there’s research on it, about how for whatever reason… I mean, not for whatever reason, we know what the reasons are. But white on audiences have a really hard time connecting with people of different skin tones, especially darker skin tones.

Liz Montague:
Because at the time I was working for a nonprofit that was mainly geared toward and focused on brown people, Middle Eastern people. So it was just wild to realize that this is empirically researched information and that the impact of it is everywhere where it is. Well, why are there so many white leads in these cartoon shows? Why are there so many white leads in these regular movies and books, et cetera? And the idea that it’s harder for white audiences to connect with, I don’t know, different skin tones, different genders.

Liz Montague:
I mean, I think that’s more on the forefront now with people talking about the recent movie Turning Red and about how people felt like they couldn’t… Not people. There was one white man in particular who did an interview who said that he couldn’t connect with it. And it was just, “I can’t connect with this, da, da, da, da, da.”

Liz Montague:
And it was because it was about a girl going through puberty who didn’t look like him. And it’s like, “Okay, but we all watched A Bug’s Life and Ratatouille, and I’m not a rat and I was able to connect with Ratatouille, but.” I just totally went on a whole tangent there, I’m sorry.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. No, I’m glad you mentioned the Turning Red thing, because I was thinking about that as you were saying that, that sort of empathy gap. Because as people of color, we are forced to kind of make that gap when we see so much media that doesn’t involve us.

Maurice Cherry:
And so when you have this one thing, particularly an animated thing geared towards children and then some grown-ass white man is like, “Well, this doesn’t represent me.” Well, it probably doesn’t because it’s not geared towards you. It’s not about you. But look how many other things out there in the world are geared towards you and about you. Do you know what I mean? It’s so weird.

Liz Montague:
Yeah. Yep. It’s the weirdest thing, but there’s literal evidence on it. And how much can a single panel, or even whatever other cartoons in the world, how much impact can they really have? I don’t know. But I was like, “Maybe if I put these universal feelings with a darker-skinned Black girl, maybe this could help someone close that gap.” Not that it’s Black people’s job to teach anybody how to feel, but I think that that was part of the intent.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Walk me a bit through the process of creating the comic. You mentioned having to sort of have it in by these specific deadlines. Does that mean that you sort of batch a bunch of comics together? How does that work?

Liz Montague:
Oh my God. It was the jankiest process ever. I was still figuring things out and working my full-time graphic design job and a million other things. And it was due every Thursday, and it would print two Thursdays after it was due. And I would have to get done the… There would have to be the social media size and then the regular size for when it would print.

Liz Montague:
And I would only submit one each week and I would sit there for, I kid you not, hours and stare at the wall and be like, “Oh my God, I have no idea what to say right now, and I have a deadline, and the editor’s texting me.” It was a mess. It was a hot mess really, but we made it through.

Maurice Cherry:
And you said that there was also kind of the added thing of seeing it in the paper. I’m sure at that point, you’re gaining a whole new audience outside of your friends on Instagram. How did people react to it when they saw this in the paper? Did you get a boost in clients or anything? How did that happen? What happened?

Liz Montague:
Honestly, I don’t really know. I guess I got wider reach, for sure. I think that tangible media, things that you can hold, just ends up in different people’s hands in a way that… There’s a lot of digital noise and people scroll and don’t always really stop and look. And I think that it being something tangible in people’s hands enabled them to stop and look more.

Liz Montague:
But I do know that after, once it was in the Washington City Paper, I ended up getting reached out to by a random blog. And they were like, “Oh, can we interview you or whatever?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure.” And then I did that interview, and then through that, that’s how the editor from Random House founded me, and that’s how I got my first book deal. So you never know what can lead to what. So the two things are probably distantly connected.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s kind of switch gears here a little bit. I want to kind of dig a bit more into your origin story. Now you mentioned living in DC, is that where you’re from originally?

Liz Montague:
No, I’m from South Jersey.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. All right. So being from South Jersey and growing up there, were you exposed to a lot of drawing and art as a kid?

Liz Montague:
I mean, yeah, I think I was. I think I have a very artsy family. Both my parents went to Pratt. My mom’s an architect, my dad’s an engineer. So I have two older sisters and we were all very exposed to that. And it was super encouraged. And my parents had a lot of friends who had been artists or were artists.

Liz Montague:
But it was always, “Oh yeah, Charlie can be artist, his parents just gave him a brownstone.” It was very clear who could be kind of what you think about when you think of a traditional quote/unquote “studio artist.” And that there was definitely a wealth gap in between that, versus who needed to have a more desk job type artist thing. Architecture, engineering, graphic design, which is what I ended up going into. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So I guess knowing that growing up, you were drawing and kind of having this interest in it… And you said both of your parents went to Pratt, but you didn’t go to Pratt. You went to the University of Richmond.

Liz Montague:
Yeah. Well, so my mom’s from the south side of Chicago, my dad’s from Brooklyn and he grew up in the projects. So they didn’t have traditional four-year college experiences. My dad went to junior college first and then went to Pratt on a basketball scholarship. My mom started out at Hampton and then eventually made her way to New York and finished her degree over a decade.

Liz Montague:
So for me, they were just kind of like, “Well, you run track and your older sister ran track and she got a scholarship, so you’re going to get a scholarship too.” And I was just kind of like, “Okay.” And University of Richmond just happened to be where I got my athletic scholarship. And that’s why I went there. I had fun.

Maurice Cherry:
No, I was going to say, there’s actually a pretty strong Hampton University to pipeline.

Liz Montague:
There is?

Maurice Cherry:
I want to say I probably had about… I know I’ve had at least three guests on the show where that’s been the case. Yeah, it’s a pretty strong pipeline. I don’t know if a lot of people know that, that it’s from HBCU to design school in that way. Tell me about your time at University of Richmond. How was that experience?

Liz Montague:
I flipped around majors a lot. I went into college knowing that I liked to draw, but not really… Even with parents who went to Pratt and were in the arts, I had no intention whatsoever of even studying art, minoring it, anything. I was like, “I’m going to get a business degree.”

Liz Montague:
And that totally didn’t work out. I hated it so much. I tried to do computer science, anthropology, English, and none of it worked. And then it was towards the end of my sophomore year and my academic advisor was like, “Listen, you need to pick a major or you might not graduate on time.” And my scholarship was for four years and I was determined to graduate in four years. And then I was like, “Okay, just put down studio art.” And that’s how it happened. I know it’s not the best story, but it’s the truth, so.

Maurice Cherry:
How was the program there?

Liz Montague:
It was really intimate, which I think I needed, especially at that time. There were more faculty than students in the major. It’s a very, very small school. I think University of Richmond has 3000 students, which was smaller than my high school. I went to a really huge rural New Jersey high school that had thousands of kids.

Liz Montague:
And our senior year, my senior year, there were five majors, we were all women, and we had six professors. So we were outnumbered by our professors. It just allowed you to have a really one-on-one experience. There was room to just try things and figure things out, and we were given a lot of freedom, which I really appreciated. It helped to really just kind of be self-motivated and not rely on, “Okay, well here’s a syllabus. Do this, this and this.” You’re really able to kind of carve your own path, if that makes sense.

Maurice Cherry:
No, it does. I was going to say, I imagine that’s really super empowering. To have not only that kind of intimate class kind of setting and makeup, but then your being able to kind of work closer with your professors, with people like that. Because I’ve had folks on the show before that have went to larger schools or went to art schools and stuff, and that kind of one-to-one kind of relationship is tough to get.

Liz Montague:
Yeah. And I knew that it was definitely like I kind of lucked out.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, something pretty cool happened. Now you’ve kind of alluded to it a bit earlier in the interview, but something pretty cool happened around your senior year with The New Yorker magazine. Tell me about that.

Liz Montague:
Yeah. I was a super brand new 22, felt very old and mature. I had just heard back a graphic design job, was super pumped, I was like, “I’m moving to DC. I’m about to be such a grownup.” And then was at the office for something, I don’t even know what, and was supposed to be working, fully supposed to be not on my phone, but I was.

Liz Montague:
And I was on Instagram, scrolling through, and on my explore page or something, The New Yorker cartoons page came up and I was just scrolling through it. And I was like, “Oh, wow. All of these cartoons are white. Every single character in these are white, it’s all kind of the same perspective over and over again. I wonder if they know?”

Liz Montague:
At the time, my headspace was in brand new, about to start at a nonprofit job in DC where I’ve just been trained on all of these unknown biases that people have and corporate structures and yada, yada, yada. So in my mind I was like, “Oh, they just must not know that they’re using all white characters. Let me just tell them, they have no idea.” And so I just hit the email button and was like, “Hey guys, don’t know if you’re aware, but all of your cartoons are white. You guys should do something about that. Best of luck.”

Liz Montague:
And that was really it. And I did not expect to hear anything back. And then I got an email back and they were like, “Oh…” It was Emma Allen, who’s the editor there. She was like, “Oh yeah, we’re aware, da, da, da, da. Is there anyone that you would recommend?” And I was like, “Oh yeah, me. Yeah, I draw cartoons.” Literally, I had no idea what I was getting myself into, at all.

Maurice Cherry:
But I mean, you shot, though.

Liz Montague:
I saw an opportunity and I took it. I saw a window and I ran through that thing.

Maurice Cherry:
Look, one of my favorite sayings is fortune favors the bold. And I mean, you saw an opportunity, you went for it. And so after you did that, after you pitched yourself and said that, did they reach out to you and say, “Let’s see what you got?” What happened?

Liz Montague:
Basically. It was like, “Okay, well send us something.” And then I think I that night was trying to cobble together some sketches. And it was 50 sketches before I got one yes. Once I got one, I was like, “Okay, so this is what they’re looking for.” And then you get two, and then three, and then four. And then you’re able to start contributing regularly.

Liz Montague:
But there was definitely a very steep learning curve. Because I remember when I first told my dad, “Oh, I’m going to have a cartoon in The New Yorker.” He was like, “What’s The New Yorker?” That was not-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh.

Liz Montague:
And he’s from New York, but he’s not from that New York. So it’s just like my frame of reference for The New Yorker was their Instagram account. I had no frame of reference for a physical magazine for The New Yorker brand.

Liz Montague:
But I think that was kind of a really big advantage, to come from the outside. Because I think that a common problem that they have, or a common thing that happens with people who submit is that they’re trying to emulate The New Yorker voice. But I had no idea that there was a New Yorker voice, so.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean, and also when I think… I mean I’m in Atlanta, so I don’t know… I mean, I know of The New Yorker, but when I think of that magazine just in my mind’s eye, I’m thinking it’s a maybe more upper middle class audience, white audience that mostly would be paying attention to or reading The New Yorker.

Maurice Cherry:
But then it’s also online and I look at a ton of stuff from The New Yorker online, so. Even in it’s just design stylings, I feel like that’s who it’s trying to sort of cater itself towards. So when you said you have to try to find what that voice was, was it about trying to tailor yourself to that audience, or more so tailoring yourself to what just the editor wanted at The New Yorker?

Liz Montague:
I mean, I think probably a little of both, because this was my first professional art job ever. Kind of straight into the fire, so to speak, where I didn’t have any concept of, “Oh, this is the deadline and if it’s not in by the deadline, it’s not going to print.” And of, “Oh, these are finals and you’re going to keep doing it until it’s right.”

Liz Montague:
And of atmosphere and what skin tones can print and what skin tones can’t print. And will it smudge into the black lines so then you won’t be able to read facial expressions?There’s such a learning curve there in general, and then on top of that… And I talked really openly with my editor, Emma, about that at the time, about, “Well, Black humor isn’t going to be funny to people who read The New Yorkers.”

Liz Montague:
And I remember I said that to her point blank, via email. I talked to her about that, where it was just, what I might find culturally funny might not be able to be in this magazine because of the voice and the audience that you’re targeting. So where does that leave me if what, because of cultural things, because of societal things, I find funny but can’t be published here, what am I… Am I supposed to, I don’t know, put myself in the shoes of if I were middle class and white?” So that was a huge barrier, but I figured it out. I mean, I got some zingers in there. I definitely got some zingers in there.

Maurice Cherry:
I would imagine once people discovered that you were the first Black woman cartoonist in The New Yorker, that probably also expanded who read The New Yorker.

Liz Montague:
I mean, I would get DMs like that where it’s like, “Oh, I read The New Yorker now because of you.” And I’m like, “Oh God, $12 a magazine? Please, spare yourself.” But I mean, I don’t know. It’s such a weird, hard conversation to have, because it’s-

Maurice Cherry:
I’m curious, let’s dig into that a little bit. What makes it weird?

Liz Montague:
I think because it can be hard for institutions to own that conversation, and then it’s kind of deflected into, “Oh, well maybe there was somebody else, and what about this? And well, we don’t really know people’s racial identity and what…”

Liz Montague:
And then it’s interesting how with these conversations about first and what’s overdue, whatever, it’s like a lot of times the conversation ends up on the individuals rather than the institutions where it’s like, “So why didn’t you guys hire anybody in the last 100 years?” You know? And it’s like, “Am I at 22,” or at the time at 22, “equipped to have that conversation? Equipped to really navigate the waters of this and navigate other people’s identities, navigate the commodification of my own identity? Am I really?”

Liz Montague:
It’s a minefield, and I think that especially right now, where we’re at as a society, it’s just whatever you share is then up for sale and you have to be willing to be not just branded, but then speak on behalf of that entire community, and then have it challenged.

Liz Montague:
And then especially for The New Yorker audience, which was used to a very specific kind of perspective and thing, and then to have me not offer that very specific thing, people didn’t take it very well sometimes. I got some wild emails. Yeah, I think that there’s one cartoon I have where it’s the girl’s hair bit off someone’s hand. They don’t sell it on the Condรฉ Nast store. It’s the only cartoon of mine that they don’t sell on the Condรฉ Nast store.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh.

Liz Montague:
It’s just weird. Did I answer that well?

Maurice Cherry:
No, I think you did. Because as you sort of said that, what sort of becomes apparent to me and hopefully to the listener is there’s this layer of activism that ends up getting added to your work that you not only didn’t ask for or volunteer for, but you didn’t include in the original work.

Liz Montague:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:29:05].

Maurice Cherry:
No, but I mean your cartoons, like you said, they’re about kind of slice of life sorts of things. You didn’t intend to layer some deep social message or anything into it, but that’s how people are perceiving it based on your identity.

Liz Montague:
Yeah. I don’t know. It’s like everybody who’s from a marginalized group is forced into the role of activist. And it’s like, especially having lived in DC, I’m first generation suburban, nobody else in my family grew up in the suburbs. The people are fighting a good fight, but that’s such a thing to just put on somebody, you know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Liz Montague:
It’s just a hard thing to navigate because then it’s like you don’t get a rest ever. And I think that that’s kind of what I realized, especially towards the end of 2020, with everything going on with the police and with George Floyd and everything, where I was just like, “Man, I’m tired.” I was just so tired and drained.

Liz Montague:
And that was the last cartoon I did for The New Yorker where it was, I think the text was, “Oh, my white friends think racism is new.” Or something like that. It just makes you tired.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I know the feeling. I totally know that feeling. Prior to doing this podcast, when I was… when did I start the Black Weblog Awards? I think it was 24? 23 or 24. I started this event online called the Black Weblog Awards. And this was back in 2004 or 2005, really kind of pre-social media. Definitely pre-Twitter, but pre-social media. Facebook, I think, was just starting to transition out of being only for college students and opening it up to everyone in the world, essentially.

Maurice Cherry:
And what I wanted to do, because I was an active blogger at the time myself, what I wanted to do was make this event that would celebrate Black bloggers that I knew of that were doing great things. Because I saw that there were other blog awards out there. There were two that were both called The Weblog Awards, although one kind of shortened their name to The Bloggies or whatever.

Maurice Cherry:
And what I saw with the winners is like, “Well, all the winners are white.” And I know that there’s people of color that are out here blogging, particularly Black people. And what got me was one of the awards had a category that was Best African or Middle Eastern Blog, and all of the nominees were white and the winner was white. And I’m like, “You mean to tell me out of the entire huge continent of Africa and the probably similarly huge section of the Middle East, only white people? I find that’s very hard to believe.”

Maurice Cherry:
And so I started the Black Weblog Awards sort of in opposition, but also to celebrate the community that I knew about that I was kind of a part of. And when I sort of talked about that layer of activism that gets added onto there, just calling it the Black Weblog Awards invited so much criticism and unnecessary hate. And this is, again, this is pre-Obama. So this is this at a time in the world, it’s post-9/11, pre-Obama, where Black and brown people really not really favored that well in terms of the media and such.

Maurice Cherry:
But I did that for seven years, ended up selling it to a friend of mine. And I mean, even as the years went on with it, it was amazing how the reception to the event changed as society changed. So around 2007, 2008, Obama’s running for president and such. Comments I kept getting back about the Black Weblog Awards is, “Well, I mean, we’re post-racial now. Why does it have to be the Black Weblog Awards? Why can’t it just be the Weblog Awards?” And I’m like, “Well, two of those already exist. And I’m only doing this for Black people. So it is the Black Weblog Awards.”

Maurice Cherry:
But as society changed and the way that people perceived the work that I did changed, I even experienced that with Revision Path when in 2015, I did a talk at South by Southwest in Austin called Where Are the Black Designers? And I was about two years into doing Revision Path, managed to land at South by Southwest with a speaker proposal, did a speech to a room of maybe about… the room sat close to 500 people. There may have been 15 or 20 people in there.

Liz Montague:
Whoa. Intimidating.

Maurice Cherry:
Nobody was there. People were charging their phones, people were asleep in the back, nobody was really paying attention, and I gave this talk. And there were a handful of folks there, “Good job,” that sort of thing.

Maurice Cherry:
When I tell you that presentation didn’t pick up traction until five years later during the summer of unrest, when we heard about what happened with George Floyd and the Minneapolis Police Department, then it started to pick up steam. And people were like, “Oh, well this is so great. This is so wonderful. We’re trying to center Black voices. We want to know about this presentation.”

Maurice Cherry:
And in my mind, I’m like, “This is five years old, but the way that people are perceiving it now has changed because the culture has changed.” Like I said, there is this layer of activism that gets added to the work that I didn’t necessarily put it there, but you’re attaching it onto it based on your societal values or what’s happening in the world and how you think you should feel about it because it exists.

Liz Montague:
You just said a word. You just said a word.

Maurice Cherry:
But it’s a lot. And I mean, I can imagine. I mean, I was going to ask this question a little bit later, but that whole thing about representation, we’ve seen this influx of Black artistic talent with cartoons and animation and fine art and such.

Maurice Cherry:
One, you see all these new Black shows and stuff. A lot of those Black shows also have fine art and they’re from Black fine artists. Now you never hear about those artists, that’s a whole other conversation. But it’s so interesting how all of these things and all these shows and movies and such, and they’re in these different genres, but they all kind of have this layer/burden of having to represent for the community. Do you feel like you have to do that through your work now?

Liz Montague:
When I first started, I definitely did. I definitely felt a lot of pressure. I mean, especially based on where I’m from. So I’m from rural South Jersey. There was a soybean farm behind my childhood house. So very, very rural, very white.

Liz Montague:
And I just remember what we would be told as the few Black people in town was, “Every white person’s opinion of a Black person is going to be formed based on how you act. So you better act right. Or else you’re damning every other Black person they’re going to meet.”

Liz Montague:
And so that was kind of the framework that I had. And I think that I just kept feeling like, “I don’t want to mess this up for anybody else.” In the cartooning world, at The New Yorker, I don’t know, in the spaces that I felt that I was at, I just didn’t want to mess it up for anyone else. So I wanted to make sure that I was saying yes to everything and super amenable and like, “Oh, no worries, it’s fine. It’s okay if you don’t have the budget for it.” Just very overly accommodating.

Liz Montague:
And then I just got sick of it and was just like, “You know what? This isn’t sustainable. It’s just not sustainable.” But I think that also as I got older, just maturity-wise, I just realized the only person I can control is me. I can’t control how I’m interpreted. I can’t control another person’s actions to a fictional future person who may or may not exist. I need to just live as a single human being in this moment and not as every possible iteration of Black person that this person could interact with. I think I was doing that for a while.

Maurice Cherry:
Well I mean also, I think whenever you’re doing work that has such a large kind of public footprint, and I feel like actors probably do this a lot. You learn eventually what strategies you have to kind of, I guess cope is the best way to put it. But you don’t read the comments, you don’t read the reviews, you just do the work and just keep moving on.

Liz Montague:
I don’t know. I think I didn’t want to not be what everyone expected me to be and then miss out on opportunities, too. Because especially early 2020 when the pandemic was starting, it was like all this stuff came out of nowhere.

Liz Montague:
And I felt really conflicted about it because I was like, “God, am I [inaudible 00:38:00] off of all of this terrible stuff happening to the Black community? Am I benefiting off of the George Floyd shootings? All of the shootings that happen to Black people that aren’t talked about, and just this collective white guilt that’s happening right now?”

Liz Montague:
Where all of a sudden, I’m getting to do stuff for Food Network and the Obama Foundation. I worked on a Biden presidential commercial. I did a Google Doodle. I don’t know. My mom was just kind of like, “Oh, just take it. Just take it and just be happy.” And I was like, “You don’t understand. What are the ethics behind this?”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, your mom’s right, just take it.

Liz Montague:
[crosstalk 00:38:40] take it.

Maurice Cherry:
If the opportunity comes, just take it. I mean, there are a lot of us that did have a bit of a come up during that time. And I think that’s kind of a bit of the secret shame around it. I guess you could call it shame, I don’t know.

Maurice Cherry:
But the fact that now people are paying attention to the work that we do, but that it had to come at a time of such civil unrest, at the death of an innocent person. That it had to come to that in order for us to be recognized. And there are some people I’ve talked to about it and they’ve said to me, “Is this what it’s like for white people all the time?”

Liz Montague:
Is it?

Maurice Cherry:
And I’m like, “I don’t know. Is it? I mean, that would be interesting if that’s the case. But it is this sort of weird tension, like you’re being recognized because… You know the hard work that you’ve done to get to this point. And yes, you’re being recognized, but the fact that you’re being recognized because of all this injustice and inequity and other things that are happening in the world, it’s sort of…

Maurice Cherry:
I don’t know. It is a very weird feeling, but at the end of the day, take the work. Take the work, get the check. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Take the work. So your mom’s right in that aspect, absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:
But I get where you’re coming from too, because I had an influx of speaking gigs and a whole bunch of stuff like that. Because I got fired from my job, they cut my whole department right before the summer of 2020. And so for all of this to happen, it’s like, “Oh, well at least I’ll be able to eat for a few more months.”

Maurice Cherry:
But it does sort of come with this psychic weight of, “Yeah, but all this other horrible stuff in the world had to happen. And it was during a global pandemic, but I’ll take it.” One thing Black folks are going to do, it’s make a way out of no way, so. Just take it.

Liz Montague:
Yeah, that’s for sure. That’s for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So now you’re a full-time cartoonist, you mentioned working at this nonprofit for a while after you graduated. What do your work days look like now?

Liz Montague:
Right now I just finished my first book, my graphic novel, Maybe An Artist. It’s available for pre-order. That’s with Penguin Random House. So that’s just finished, and that was taking up literally all of my time up until a month ago, maybe. And now I’m working on a picture book, also for Random House. And I also have a three book deal with Scholastic for a three book Y-series.

Liz Montague:
So my days are pretty much split between those two projects, with the series grouped together. I’m one of those crazy people who wake up really early and run. I don’t know, I like being out in the sun. So my days just start with me waking up, going for a run, I usually do some kind of HIIT class or something. My husband makes me a coffee, I try not to check my phone or my email because if I do, I’ll get sucked in and then I’ll just be on my phone and suddenly it’s three o’clock.

Liz Montague:
I actually try to get done all… I do a to-do list of everything that needs to get done. Look at chapter one, or finish sketches, the ending or beginning of whatever. So I’ll do those early in the morning when I can rely on my focus, because as soon as it’s lunchtime, all bets are off. I pretty much do that until lunch, and then in the late afternoon do emails, and then whatever else is left on the to-do list. That’s pretty much my day. I usually have the same day every day.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. Are you still doing the Liz at Large comic?

Liz Montague:
I haven’t posted any of them. I still do them sometimes for myself. I don’t know, the cartooning world, there’s just so much going on. And it’s very rare that I even watch the news these days to even… I think that the thing with cartooning, or at least for me back when I was doing it more than I am now, it’s very reactive.

Liz Montague:
And it’s usually very reactive to news specifically, where it’s like I’m looking at the news, I’m looking at social events, I’m looking at what’s going on and then I’m reacting to it. But these days, it’s like I don’t really give my myself things to react to anymore. Because I feel like I learned the hard way in 2020 and early 2021 that there can be a breaking point to that.

Maurice Cherry:
Hmm. How do you kind of keep motivated and inspired with the work that you’re doing?

Liz Montague:
I think that right now, I kind of just want to see, “Okay, let’s see how far I could go.” That’s definitely part of it, of just like, “Okay, let’s see when the wheels fall off. How long can I really pull this off for?” That’s definitely a part of it.

Liz Montague:
And the other part of it, I think, does go back to even why I started Liz at Large. This idea of emotional literacy and of just seeing Black characters and of providing Black characters in general, and being able to provide Black characters as a Black woman. Because you wouldn’t believe, I mean, I’m sure you would believe the amount of Black characters and characters of color in general that are not made by people of color.

Liz Montague:
And to be able to… I mean, authentic is such a weird word. But to be able to provide a… to be able to showcase an experience that I’ve actually lived, I think, is something really powerful. And something that I’m really proud to be able to do. But I don’t know, it’s also that whole idea of, “If not me, who?” That’s a trap, that’s a total trap. So I think my why is day to day. It’s day to day.

Maurice Cherry:
Look, at this stage, I think we’re all kind of taking it day by day. So I completely understand that.

Liz Montague:
I wish I had some big, “Well, you know…” A reason or something. But I think I’m just figuring this out.

Maurice Cherry:
And at this stage of your life, that’s the time to do it. That’s the time to just try to figure it out, you know? I know that you and I have sort of talked about this prior to the interview about what you want sort of people to take away from it. But don’t be so hard on yourself. Take it day by day, as things happen.

Maurice Cherry:
I think certainly, with what you’ve just described already, you are at a great place in life right now. Great. Great. So take it day by day-

Liz Montague:
I can appreciate that.

Maurice Cherry:
… and kind of just go through the days and your feelings and work as it happens. Because I’m telling you, I’m telling you, there’s a lot of people at your age that would love to have that kind of just opportunity and work lined up. I mean, a three book deal? A three book deal. That’s major. That’s major.

Liz Montague:
No. It’s just like-

Maurice Cherry:
A three book deal, on top of a book you’re already working on, on top of a book that’s about to come out. Come on now.

Liz Montague:
It’s so weird though, because I feel like day to day is also so solitary. I don’t have coworkers, I don’t know people. I mean, it’s hard because the only people… So I’m comparing. You shouldn’t be comparing yourself to, you shouldn’t be, but everybody does it. And it’s like you end up comparing yourself to your wildest ideals and your biggest insecurities of just like, “Well, you should be doing more. Well, what about this? Well, what about Instagram?”

Liz Montague:
And then that’s a whole other can of worms, because it’s like the social presence, the social media presence part of it. Because I feel like there’s a huge pressure, especially nowadays, to have this very big social media presence to… I don’t know, exist on all platforms, be approachable at all times, be connecting at all times.

Liz Montague:
And I remember I texted my agent Wendy and was like, “Listen, man. I can’t do TikTok. I can’t do it, please.” Yeah. And she was like, “Of course not. You don’t have to.” But it’s crazy though, because these days in meetings and for negotiations, they’ll ask you your followers. And it’s just like, “What? What?” I don’t know. It’s to think about the longevity, the sustainability of this, of such a fast paced world where we’re consuming so much so quickly, you know?

Maurice Cherry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I’ll tell you though, the way to not burn out from that is to focus on the audience and the community that you have. The thing with a lot of social media, and I know this from one, just from being old and being around on the internet forever.

Maurice Cherry:
But there’s so much about modern social media that is about trying to attract an audience that you don’t have. And I think what can end up happening with that is you end up exhausting all of these efforts and jumping through all these hoops to try to impress people that don’t know you, don’t know your work, et cetera.

Maurice Cherry:
The reality is if the work is good, the people that already support you will kind of do some of that legwork for you. They’ll tell people, they’ll tell friends, they’ll mention you in rooms that you’re not in. So you don’t have to be on all the things all the time. I think probably for a visual media or a visual artist like you are, being an illustrator and a cartoonist, being on Instagram does make sense because it is a visual medium. TikTok is the Wild Wild West.

Liz Montague:
It really is. It really is.

Maurice Cherry:
And I mean, aside from just the ever-changing and shifting algorithm of the platform, it’s also super toxic. And I know art, I’ve seen artists on TikTok that I’ve had on the show. So I know that it is helpful to kind of get the word out to people. But then it also exposes you to so many just idiots that don’t get it. And they spend their free time trying to instill the seeds of doubt into you so you don’t do the work that people love you for. You know what I mean?

Liz Montague:
Yep.

Maurice Cherry:
So you don’t have to be on all the things, because you spread yourself too thin. Focus on the audience that you have and on the platforms that you feel you can at least control and have some semblance of yourself on there, where you don’t have to change who you are or what you do to kind of get your work out there.

Liz Montague:
So that’s been the hardest part lately, is just being like, “Okay, who I am right now, right this moment, not me 10 years from now or me three years ago, who I am right now is capable of doing this work and is enough.” I feel like everyone’s kind of dealing with that. I feel like now we’re in a stable enough place as a country and as… well, I mean as stable as America ever is, for people to reflect on, “In the thick of it for two years, and what happened to me during those two years? What did I lose? What did I gain? Am I proud of what came out on the other side of it?”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Liz Montague:
I think a lot of people are dealing with that. I think I’m especially dealing with that as just, I don’t know, especially… 30 is looking pretty close coming from this side of 25. 30’s looking pretty close. And I’m just like, “Jesus,” trying to figure it out. We don’t need to figure it all out, that’s not real, social media and everything else, but.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I mean give yourself some grace, certainly. And realize that, I mean, like I said before, where you’re at right now at your age is great. But I mean, and whatever way you feel is I think the best way that doesn’t take too much out of your regular process. But even just documenting where you’re at in some way I think is helpful for other people so they know that… Again, like you said, we’re all kind of figuring it out. But I think particularly for Black creatives, there’s this strong propaganda to hustle hard and “They sleep, we grind.”

Liz Montague:
Oh, for sure. For sure.

Maurice Cherry:
And that is not sustainable at all. I get these naps in everyday. Please believe it.

Liz Montague:
Exactly. [crosstalk 00:50:53], oh my gosh.

Maurice Cherry:
I work smart, but I’m sleeping over here, a lot. So once you sort of find what that balance is, I think even just documenting it… Even if it’s just for yourself, not even for the public. But just so you know, “This is how I felt as I was going through this time in life, as I was trying to figure these things out,” I think is super helpful.

Liz Montague:
I mean I feel even just talking about as Black creatives or Black artists or whatever, what’s attainable, I didn’t really think that it was possible to be your own boss for real. Or have stability. Does that make sense? Where it’s like-

Maurice Cherry:
No, that makes sense.

Liz Montague:
And I think that it shocked me more than anyone, that, “Holy crap, I’m a homeowner. When did that happen? How did that happen?”

Liz Montague:
… wild that we don’t even realize what we’ve written off for ourselves because of whatever paths we choose or wherever we find ourselves. And I think that especially for myself, there was a lot that I didn’t think was achievable. And it’s like, “Oh, wow. Actually, this is.”

Liz Montague:
And I think that a lot more Black artists especially need to realize that. Because I think that especially the eat, sleep, grind culture, as someone who lived it, that burned me out so quick. I was like, “I’m never going to draw again. I hate this.” It took a year to come out of that.

Maurice Cherry:
Now even with these books that you are working on and everything, do you have a dream project that you’d love to do one day?

Liz Montague:
You know what, speaking into existence now, I would love to work with Disney. Hit me up, I’m a huge Princess and the Frog fan. Beyond that, I don’t really know. I think I’d like to teach somewhere down the line, or even now. I used to teach really fun community art classes when I was in DC, but then the pandemic kind of put an end to that.

Liz Montague:
I think I’d like to teach. Who knows? I swear, every other week I’m talking myself out of going to medical school or something, or becoming a pastry chef. It could be anything at this point. I would definitely love to do something centered around Black mental health, for sure. And diving into that and different ways of just connecting.

Liz Montague:
Because I know that people love to say, “Hold space,” and whatever that means. But I think that beyond just face-to-face talk therapy, which in a perfect world would be accessible to everyone and they would be able to have Black therapists who could understand where they’re coming from, we need to deal with the world that we’re in right now. Where there need to be more accessible ways of connecting beyond just this one way that is very not accessible for most people. And I feel like there’s some kind of world where there’s an art-based solution to that. Or at least in the world that I want to exist in.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want this next chapter of your story to be?

Liz Montague:
I hope in the next five years, or not “I hope,” I know. In the next five years, I’m going to be spearheading a lot more projects. I feel like up until this point, I really just… people have approached me and I’ve said yes.

Liz Montague:
Whereas especially with the series at Scholastic, that was the first thing that I pitched myself, I came up with myself and that was fully my idea that I’m going to be taking to fruition. So more of that, more of me getting to execute my ideas instead of executing other people’s ideas. I hope a lot more of that.

Maurice Cherry:
Well just to wrap things up here, Liz, where can our audience find out more information about you and about your work and everything online?

Liz Montague:
My website is lizatlarge.org. I’m on Instagram, @lizatlarge. I’m also on Twitter, but I don’t really tweet that much. It’s also @lizatlarge.

Maurice Cherry:
Liz Montague, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I mean, as I was doing my research for this interview and everything, I was like, “I think I’m becoming a fan of you and the work that you’re doing.” I mean, even the fact that you’ve managed to accomplish this much at a young age is phenomenal. And I’m really excited to kind of see where you go from here.

Maurice Cherry:
I mean, I think it’s one thing to have these accolades about first Black women cartoonist in The New Yorker and then to have all this success. But being able to sustain that as you go forward in your career is going to be super important. And I hope that this interview kind of has given you something to think about. But then also I’m excited to kind of come back to this in a few years after we see you really blow up huge and do big things. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Liz Montague:
Thank you so much for having me and reaching out to me and just having this space in general. This is actually so awesome. Really. I really enjoyed this.

Steenz

If you have been a listener of the show for a while, then you know I love cartoons and animation. So having a chance to sit down with this week’s guest, Steenz, was a lot of fun. Steenz is one of the few Black women syndicated cartoonists in mainstream funny pages for her work on “Heart of the City”, and her work on previous titles has netted her several coveted awards, including the Eisner Award, in the cartoon industry.

We talked about her picking up the torch from Mark Tatulli for “Heart of the City”, and she walked me through her creative process for starting on new projects. She also talked how she first got into comics, her teaching at Webster University, and one of her dream projects — a re-imaginging of Encyclopedia Brown! Keep an eye out for Steenz — I think we’ll be seeing her work in the world for years and years to come!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Steenz:
My name is Steenz, and I’m a cartoonist and editor and professor of comics.

Maurice Cherry:
How has the year been going for you so far?

Steenz:
So far, we’re still in the pandemic. So, we’re doing the best we can on that front. But in terms of work, pretty good, still working on Heart of the City as well as my new graphic novel. We just started the production on that.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me about Heart of the City. What’s it about?

Steenz:
So, Heart of the City is a comic strip that had been going on since 1999. So, the original creator, Mark Tatulli, he wrote it back then and had been doing the art form and writing for it for the following 21 years or so. And so, he decided to retire and the syndicate, Andrews McMeel, decided to, instead of retiring the entire comic, to get a new artist and take the story to a new place for 2020.

Steenz:
Heart is about a young girl named Heart Lamarr who lives with her single mom in Philly. And so, the stories are about her and her friends’ lives as they grow up through middle school.

Maurice Cherry:
And how has it been inheriting such a well-known comic like that?

Steenz:
It was super intimidating to begin with just because if you pick up something that’s been going on for 20 years, that’s a long time to kind of make a name for yourself and really put in the backstory into a comic. And so, it was intimidating to jump on and start anew especially since my background was traditional comics like single-issue comics and graphic novels and not so much syndicated comic strips which are definitely a bit more… You have dimensions that you have to work with. You have types of terms of phrase that you can work with.

Steenz:
So, it was definitely a lot to get used to at the very beginning. But thankfully, my editor, she had a lot of confidence in me and rightly so because I ended up getting on the train pretty quickly. So, I didn’t really have anything to worry about in terms of actually doing comic strips.

Steenz:
Well, that’s good. I mean I think it’s one thing to slip into something that’s kind of well known already has an environment built around and then trying to discover that as you go. But I’m curious how have readers been taking it? What’s the reception been like?

Steenz:
Yeah. It’s a little hard to tell. Syndicated comics, the way they work, typically, you don’t really see them going one and done. They usually are comics that last for a very long time. And, usually, the creator is the same for a very long time, and it was the same thing for Mark Tatulli 20 years. And so, the fan base is definitely not one to greet change very nicely, I guess, is the best way to put it.

Steenz:
When you work with a graphic novel or a single issue comic, there’s so many ways and avenues for someone to read your book whether they picked it up from a comic book store or Barnes & Noble to whether a teacher recommended it or a friend recommended it, whether they read it right when it came out or years after. You always have so many different kinds of people that tell you this is what they thought of the book whether it’s on panels or over Twitter or anything like that.

Steenz:
But when it comes to syndicated comics because they are so specifically in newspapers, really, the only way for you to read it is if you are reading that the newspaper that has purchased that comic or if you are reading it on gocomics.com which doesn’t really have a very well-moderated comment section. And so, like I was saying about the fans who are not very welcoming to change, that’s pretty much where you’re going to see that.

Steenz:
So, I don’t usually go on to go comics because why head towards negativity, right? But I’m not really sure what people think of it. Occasionally, someone will come up and say like, “Oh, this is really good,” or if they like this arc. And that’s really nice to hear. But I think I’m going to find out more what people think about it when it’s collected and more widely available.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s a good idea. Never read the comment section.

Steenz:
I know. I know. It’s just like it’s so strange because the kinds of things that they had issues with was not even like in terms of storytelling. It’s just because I’m not Mark Tatulli. There weren’t even any real issues people had except for the fact that I wasn’t him.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now, some of the other titles and comics that you’ve worked on include Rolled and Told, Witchy, Archival Quality, Quincredible. What do you sort of remember the most from each of those titles?

Steenz:
Well, they’re all very, very different in that how I’m attached to them. So, Rolled and Told, Witchy, Quincredible, those are all books that I’ve edited. So, my connection to those are in the form of I need to get the story out in the most effective way possible, so that not just the writer is happy, but also it is an entertaining read for people.

Steenz:
Meanwhile, Archival Quality was the first graphic novel that I did with my co-creator, Ivy Noelle Weir, and that, it took us many, many years to complete as graphic novels do. So, I also had a huge hand in creating these characters and creating their mannerisms and how they interact with each other in addition to the storytelling that Ivy brought to it. So, it’s just an entirely different process, and I definitely feel a lot closer to Archival Quality than I do to the other books for that reason.

Maurice Cherry:
So, with some of the work that you’re doing now, it sounds like you work in different roles. Sometimes, you’re editing. Sometimes, you’re creating. Let’s say from the creation process like, say, you’ve got an idea for, I don’t know, a comic or a strip or something like that, what does that process look like to go from start to finish?

Steenz:
I think it really depends on if it is something that’s longer or something that’s relatively short. For example, so, the other night, my husband and I, we have been watching the Riddick universe movies because we love them, and I was thinking as I saw him working the next day, that he was on the Riddick IMDb page. And so, in my head, I was like, “he’s still thinking about Riddick.”

Steenz:
And later in the day, my husband was like, “I’ve been thinking about when Riddick 4 comes out,” and I’m just like, “I need to know when we’re going to see it.” And then, he reminded me of this meme that’s going around where this woman is in bed with her husband, and she’s like, “I bet he’s thinking about other women,” and in his head is like whatever the punchline is, is what he’s actually thinking about.

Steenz:
And so, I was like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I did a comic where we’re sitting in bed and my head is I bet he’s thinking about Chronicles of Riddick 2004 and the punchline is [Kia 00:11:28] is thinking when does Riddick 4 come out.” So, it’s like on the one hand, a lot of my jokey strips come from just conversations that I have with my husband or things that I see online, and I want to make a joke about or a situation that I thought was hilarious and wanted to share with others.

Steenz:
Meanwhile, if it’s something for like Heart of the City, I think about an entire storyline, okay. So, if they’re going to theater camp, what’s something that they’re going to get out of going to theater camp? What is Heart going to get out of it? And so, then I think, “Okay. Well, if she’s going to get an idea of knowing when to stand up for something versus how to pick your battles and how can I show that kind of story,” and then, I’m just break it down further and further and further to how does the story get played out, which part of the story is going to be my Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Steenz:
And then, also remembering how am I going to make sure that this punch line is delivered as well because, for the most part, comic strips do have to be funny as well. So, it really just depends. If it’s something longer, if it’s something short, I just wait for inspiration to come pretty much. I’m just thankful that I get inspired by a lot of different things. I have a lot of different hobbies. I watch a lot of different types of media. I played different kinds of games. I read all kinds of books. So, I think I’m always going to have something to pull from when I’m creating these stories whether it’s real life or other people’s creations.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s interesting that, I don’t know, decomposition is a part of the process to start with something bigger and then break it down because it almost feels like it would be the opposite.

Steenz:
That’s what most people think. But I always say that work smarter not harder. It’s very scrooge things to say, Scrooge McDuck thing to say. But it’s true because if your idea is this magnum opus of a story that spans hundreds of years and goes across all space and time, where do you begin? So, you have to deconstruct to even find a starting point.

Steenz:
So, usually, when I’m working with my students or with clients, I really like to get to the base of the story. I know you want to tell a story about this witch and her interactions with her brother. But what’s the conflict? Who is the person? Let’s get down to the bare, bare bones and get it as deconstructed as possible. And then, we can build on top of that because if you go the other way around, what you’re going to do is you’re going to fill in the space with things that you think will solve plot holes. But you don’t get that problem if you start small and add on to it because you can always go back and say, “Well, if I add this, how is it going to interact with everything else that I’ve already created?” It’s just so much easier to start smaller and go bigger than the other way around.

Maurice Cherry:
Great advice. I like that. That’s really good. So, you’re based in St. Louis. Is that where you grew up also?

Steenz:
So, I was actually born in Detroit, and we moved into St. Louis when I was around 10 years old. So, I did go to high school in St. Louis, and that’s pretty much all you need in order for anyone from here to know that, “Oh, you’re from St. Louis.”

Maurice Cherry:
Is St. Louis a big comic city?

Steenz:
Yes and no, I guess. we don’t really have a comic convention that comes to the city that isn’t wizard world. But wizard world is great value conventions. [crosstalk 00:14:57] better than it is. But there was a lot of comic book stores here. There are a lot of creators here. Marie Enger lives here. Matt Kent, Cullen Bunn, Brian Hurt, there’s a lot of creators that are here in the St. Louis greater area.

Steenz:
So, I always felt like I had something to go to whether it was ink and drink or a collective to put out comics with or drawing groups. So, I never felt like I didn’t have that sort of thing. The only thing that St. Louis lacked was corporate “jobs” around comics. There wasn’t a publisher for me to work at. In New York, there’s publishers on every corner. And when you have a very specific industry comic books, they’re just not going to be in every single city. So, yes and no for St. Louis. Yes and no.

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. It’s interesting as kids, we’re exposed to so much animation and comics and cartoons and everything. When did you start making comics?

Steenz:
I didn’t start making comics until I was an adult. I was 21, 20 when I started making comics because that was never an option for me, not because I didn’t think it was something I couldn’t do. It was something that never occurred to me. And when you don’t see something, you just don’t believe it. If someone’s like, “Why don’t you be a comic book creator?” It’s like, “What?” What black women comic book creators are there? Especially when you’re nine years old and you’re watching Justice League, the idea that that’s something you could do growing up just isn’t there unless you see it.

Steenz:
And I never saw it which is why I didn’t even go to a comic book store until I was an adult as well. I didn’t really believe that they existed because I never saw them where I live. So, I started my interest in fandoms and comics industry. I really, really loved superhero comics. I loved reading standalone graphic novels. I was hugely into manga growing up as well. That sort of thing has always been a part of my life. I remember the first purchase that I could have ever made on my own was choosing which shoes I wanted to buy at Payless, and I chose the Sailor Moon shoes.

Steenz:
So, on the one hand, I’ve always been attached to entertainment. But on the other hand, it was never something that I considered as a career until I dropped out of college, and I saw people doing it.

Maurice Cherry:
Speaking of college, and I don’t know maybe you just answered my question, I mentioned that you dropped out. But what was it like there? You went to Maryville University of St. Louis.

Steenz:
Yeah. I mean I like the college experience. I like not living with my parents and getting drunk and meeting new people and figuring out who I am as a person. That’s the college experience. But did it prepare me for comics? No. I mean I would say it prepared me for nothing. I think with college, you really need to know what you want before you go. So many kids, they’re 16, 17, 18 years old when they’re told to go to college and figure out a career for the rest of their lives. But they don’t even know who they are. And when you’re that young, you don’t even know what the right questions are to ask.

Steenz:
I was in the art department, and I knew that I liked drawing, and I liked reading comics. And the question of what do I do with this, how do I succeed at this, what can I do with my talents, those sort of questions, you just don’t know to ask when you’re that young. I went because I was supposed to go. That’s what you do when you graduate high school in the suburbs. You go to college, and that’s what I did.

Steenz:
But as I went and as it was getting more and more expensive, and I don’t come from money, so it was all financial aid and figuring out what I could afford. And at a point, it was like this is getting too expensive for me to pay on my own, and they’re not really helping me with any sort of direction. So, I’m leaving. What’s the point of me staying here? So, that’s when I just got into the industry and just started working. So, I was working at Victoria’s Secret. I was working at a Hallmark Store. I was working at all these different part-time jobs just to make ends meet.

Steenz:
And eventually, I ended up getting a job at the local comic book store, and that’s where things started to take a turn was when I was more exposed to creators and the actual process of creating comics and selling comics. I was in comics retail for four years. I was a manager there. So, I learned a lot about how to sell a comic, and what sort of things you need in order to be successful in the comics industry. And so, all of that knowledge was there, and that’s where I got it from the actual job of being in a comic shop. So, no. College did not help, not that it can’t help because I do teach cartooning at college.

Steenz:
until we get to a point where college is not a money farm, I don’t know if we’re going to find a lot of programs that are appropriately preparing kids for the real world. The fact that a lot of colleges don’t have a mandatory this is how you do taxes course, tells me enough. So, hopefully, when people are going back to school or they finally decided that they do want to get that education, if they decide to get it Webster University, you’ll have me as a professor, and I’ll teach you the basics of cartooning. But for me, it was I had to be hands-on because that’s all that there was.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That’s a great point about knowing what it is that you want to do once you sort of get to college. For me, I went to an HBCU. I went to Morehouse. And even when I was choosing my major, initially, I went because I had a scholarship. And then, I was going to do computer science, computer engineering and started out doing it, but really wanted to make websites.

Maurice Cherry:
And I remember my advisor telling me like, “If this is what you want to do, you need to change your major because the internet is a fad.” I should mention this this is in 1999. So, the internet literally just was starting to become a thing, and people really didn’t know the depth or breadth of what could be done on the internet. And I switched majors to something that I liked which was math which probably sounds weird to say. But I went-

Steenz:
No. [crosstalk 00:21:19] math too.

Maurice Cherry:
I went all through college and majored in math. But by the time I graduated, I had nothing lined up at all because I didn’t want to go to graduate school which was really the only thing that my major was sort of preparing me for was to be a professional, not a professional mathematician, but to at least go to graduate school. That was the next stop, and I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t want to do that.” I did 12 years of school plus four years of this. I’m done with school right now, and they’re like, “Oh, well. Good luck. There was nothing to do.” I also did a bunch of just retail jobs and customer service jobs before I ended up falling into my first sort of design position. And even then, yeah, it was sort of you learn on the job because, unfortunately, you didn’t really pick it up in college.

Steenz:
I mean you also learn what you like by finding out what you don’t like.

Maurice Cherry:
I think that’s the truth.

Steenz:
I mean when I was in school, the art program was studio art graphic design or interior design. I knew for sure I wasn’t interested in interior design, and I didn’t know if I was interested in graphic design because all I knew is that I like to draw, and I like to use a tablet to do it. So, does that mean I need to get into graphic design since they focus on digital work while studio art focuses on gallery art?

Steenz:
And so, I went to graphic design thinking, “Well, this is probably the right direction, since I use a digital tablet to draw my comics or my illustrations.” And then, I get there, and it’s just, “Oh, this is all just working for somebody else. This looks shit. I don’t want to do this at all.” I went back to studio art. But now that I’m back in the studio art is like, “How am I supposed to be using my digital illustration in this course that is trying to teach me watercolor and oil paint which I like?” It’s fine. But it is not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Steenz:
So, yeah, that’s why I think it’s so important for people to actually just go out and work. Everyone needs to do at least one retail job, one food service job so that, A, you know how to treat people who take those jobs and then also so that you can find out is this something that you’re passionate about. What did you like about being in retail? What did you like about working in food service, because what I liked about being in retail was to be able to actually hear what someone wants and to help them get what they want to get.

Steenz:
So, while I may have been a beauty lead at Victoria’s Secret, yes, cool. I learned about makeup. But I also found out what people wanted to see when they put on makeup, what they’re looking for when it comes to their skin care, actually having those conversations with people and figuring out what they needed. And I think that sort of thing led me towards being a better editor and teacher because I can actually hear what people are saying and figure out what are you getting, what are you not getting, what can I help you with?

Steenz:
So, in a way, even the jobs that you don’t think are going to be stepping stones to your future. They are. Everything you do matters which is why I’m like, “So, be careful when it comes to taking out life-altering loans.”

Maurice Cherry:
I tell people sometimes that your expertise is sometimes the sum of your experiences. It may not necessarily just be, “Oh, I went to this school, then this school, and that.” It’s a lot of things just like you mentioned. It’s food service. It’s retail. It’s things outside of what you think you want to do that end up informing your overall view of what it is that you want to do. [crosstalk 00:24:47]

Steenz:
And then, everything moves forward as well. So, I was doing four years at comics retail. And so, yes, I had experience with retail management. But I also had experience with books and learning about the BISAC codes and the reason things are produced a certain way so that they fit on shelves. That information and knowing about doing events for the store, that’s community event building. That’s event organization. All of that information helped me be a better librarian. All of my information about being a librarian helped me to be a better marketing person at a publisher.

Steenz:
All that marketing knowledge, all that library knowledge, all that retail knowledge helped me be a better editor because I knew what was already out there, and what works, and what doesn’t work, and why. So, it’s like everything that you do leads to something else. You just have to trust the process that things will work out.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. So, eventually, you ended up working for a comic book, a publishing company. But in 2019, you struck out on your own as a cartoonist. Talk to me about that.

Steenz:
Yeah. So, that was really scary because when you’re used to getting an income from a W-2 stable income, it’s scary to have to be your own boss. So, that is something that I always want to tell people that it is not not going to be scary. It’s okay to be stressed because it’s stressful. When you are a freelancer, there’s a lot of stuff you have to take care of. But I knew that there were certain things that I wanted to do.

Steenz:
I was talking to, I consider her, my editorial mentor. I don’t know if she knows it. But she was saying, “What’s something that you want to do when you wake up in the morning? What’s something that you know that you want to do every day, not a job title, not a company you don’t work for? What’s something you want to do?” And so, I said, “I want to make comics. I want to continue to edit comics because I love helping people bring their visions to life.”

Steenz:
And I also want to teach because I’ve done a bunch of different kinds of workshops and getting people to understand comics. But the reason I want to teach is because I want to open that door for more people to get into the industry because it is so difficult, and she was like, “Then, that’s what you need to do. That’s what you need to find a way to make lucrative so that you can keep a roof over your head and work that way.”

Steenz:
And so, I first started off by doing editorial pitches. I was helping people with their pitch PDFs and giving them editorial feedback on not just the story but also the entire pitch as a whole. And so, for the first part of my freelance life was that last half of 2019 was a lot of that doing a ton of editorial for small publishers, for individuals, for groups who were working on magazines and then also doing comics for magazines, illustrations for businesses.

Steenz:
So, I was doing a lot of things that I was already doing while I was working at the publisher and while I was working at the library. But now, they’ve just moved into the forefront, and I’ve just been doing even more of that because there was a lot of stuff that I would turn down because I was busy. I had a job. I can’t just say yes to every creative endeavor that comes to me. But also, I didn’t know if that’s what I wanted. When I was working at the library, when I was working as an editor, I loved it. I loved editing comics. I loved helping people, and I did not ever think, “Man, the goal for me is to be my own boss.” That was never my goal.

Steenz:
I was like, “If I can find a way to get a steady pay in for the rest of my life, and I can still make comments on the side, that would be ideal.” So, yeah, it was never my goal to just be a freelancer because that’s a lot of work, and I don’t like doing a lot of work, I mean in the nicest way possible. When I finally started doing freelance, it was a lot. It was very hard, and I’m really thankful that I have an agent, and I’ve been able to get so many different opportunities from not just illustration but editorial opportunities.

Steenz:
And I even had someone say, “Hey, I can’t teach this class at Webster because he got a promotion.” And so, because of his promotion, he couldn’t teach one of the classes, the cartooning class at Webster. And he saw that I had a lot more free time now, and he reached out to me, and he said, “Would you want to teach the cartooning class?”

Steenz:
And so, that’s how I ended up with my job at Webster University which is another thing that they don’t tell you in school, is that you don’t have to go to school to be a college professor. You just need to have the experience. And so now, that’s what I do. I teach cartooning, and I edit freelance. And then, I also do my art as well.

Maurice Cherry:
So, yeah. Let’s talk about Webster University in your class. Tell me about it.

Steenz:
Yeah. So, I teach cartooning which is the class you have to take before comic-book making. So, it is a prerequisite course. You learn about the basics, basics, basics of comics. I mean we’re talking about simplifying your illustrations to one panel comics to silent comics, to strip comics and not only do I teach them the basics and the fundamentals of cartooning. But I also teach them tools that they’ll need to succeed in the future. So, whether it’s taxes or a little bit of knowledge about copyright law, just those kinds of things that will help them when they get out there.

Steenz:
Anytime I think about my college experience, I just get so mad that I wasn’t prepared more. And so, I do the best I can to prepare them for what I can whenever we have the time in between big sections in my class.

Maurice Cherry:
What do your students teach you?

Steenz:
Man, honestly, how to be funnier. Honestly, I laugh so much not at my students but with my students because they’re just… I don’t know. It’s nice to see young creatives because they have not yet been brought down by the world.

Maurice Cherry:
Fair. Yeah.

Steenz:
And it’s depressing to say it. But that’s what it is. So many times during the finals which is to create an a 10-strip booklet, so, it’ll have 10 comics. They have an overarching theme. They individually can stand on their own. But they all go together. With that project, I find so many fascinating stories, so many different styles, so many ways to story tell that it’s nice to know that the knowledge is all there. It’s easy for anyone to make comics if they put their mind to it.

Steenz:
So, there’s so many students that come in and like, “I can’t draw, or I don’t know if I have the right tools to make a comic book.” And I just want to be like, “You’re starting too far ahead. Just think about storytelling. Think about what makes you laugh. Think about how words interact with images. That kind of baseline thinking is all you need to make comics. And if you slow down and you put your sights right, you can create some pretty incredible stuff without even realizing it.

Steenz:
I’ve read some comics that I just loved. And no, they were not Michelangelo’s David in terms of illustration. But it didn’t have to be, and that’s one of the best parts about comics, is you don’t have to know how to draw, be an incredible draftsman. You don’t have to have created comics for 20 years to be able to make comics. And I’m reminded of that every time I teach.

Maurice Cherry:
I can imagine, like you say, what I sort of get from this conversation with you so far is that you really have this immense capacity for helping people. And like you said, you really love to make people bring their vision to life. And so, I can see how teaching would be sort of a natural extension of that.

Steenz:
Yeah. I mean I someone to walk away with something when they finish their interaction with me. So, if I’m teaching them comics, I want them to be able to walk away feeling a little more confident that they could make comics, or if I am editing them, I want them to walk away feeling like they’re a better writer after they’ve worked with me than they were before.

Steenz:
If someone’s reading my comics, I want them to walk away with that was funny and gave me an iota of happiness for a half second. And so, it’s just like I want people to get something out of things because I guess it may just be my history of going to school and feeling like I wasted a lot of time because I didn’t really have a direction. That’s why I always feel like I need to make sure that you get something out of this especially if you’re a student, especially if you go to any college, they’re not cheap. If you get a scholarship, that’s great. But they are not cheap. You cannot deny how much money people are putting into these schools. And so, I want to make sure that they get something out of it because there is nothing that infuriates me more than people wasting their money.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, one thing that I’ve mentioned before we started recording that I’ve had a few cartoonists and artists and such on the show before. And something that we always end up talking about in some respects is representation which I think something it’s a huge thing right now, I think, especially as people look at comics and animation not as a juvenile thing. But it’s just another medium to tell stories. It feels like representation always sort of comes into that conversation particularly within the past, I don’t know, year or so that the larger world has woken up to the fact that black lives matter and all this sort of stuff. Do you ever feel like that you have to sort of “represent” in the work that you do?

Steenz:
No. I feel like I have to just represent myself. And the more authentic I am, the better that is for younger people who look to me because when I was growing up, I’m sure we have a similar… Anyone that likes anime and manga or punk music or alt style, that sort of thing, oftentimes, isn’t really embraced in black families.

Steenz:
For me, it’s really nice to be my authentic self so that people who do not feel like they are enough or doing the right things the right way to show that their way is the right way. There’s always this question of like, ‘Well, I don’t know if I’m black enough because I don’t listen to X, Y, Z or I read manga a lot or whatever.” And I it’s like that’s not the way it has to be, like, “Are you black? Yes. Do you read? Manga. Yes. Okay. Well, then you’re a black manga reader.”

Steenz:
So, I think for me, I’m not really trying to represent blackness as a whole. I’m trying to represent authenticity and knowing that who you are is who you are, and that’s why you are who you are. I don’t know. I know that sounds crazy. But I mean I don’t know. I want people to feel okay in their own skin. And oftentimes, that happens when you see authentic stories. And so, for me, if someone is, for example, one of the strips that I did for Heart of the City was Charlotte and Dean are supposed to be watching the stream of the Street Fighter competition, and she forgot that she had wash day on Sunday.

Steenz:
So, she’s got to get her hair done all while holding up her phone so that she could still watch the stream so that she and Dean has something to talk about. So, the story was just really cute where she’s like, “Mom, watch gently,” and she’s trying to get her hair blow-dried, and she’s like, “Oh, I can’t believe that guy isn’t even blocking.” She’s just being herself. She’s doing the things that she likes to do. She likes to watch Street Fighter competitions, and she’s also black which means she also has to do wash day every once in a while.

Steenz:
And so, when you do that sort of storytelling, it shows people who are not black that we are just like everybody else. Yes, we have these cultural things that we must do like wash day. But also, you can catch me watching Twitch to see who’s doing the best when it comes to Street Fighter. I think it’s important to just be yourself, be authentic, and that is enough to show people that there is more than the stereotypes. There’s more than the box that you think you have to be in.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. That’s a good point. I like that. I need a wash day myself actually now that I’m thinking of that.

Steenz:
Oh my god. I’ve been just putting gel to hold it back. So, I’m like, “Hold on, guys. I justโ€ฆ”

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I’ve been holding off because I’m like, “Do I want to do this in the middle of the week or do I want to wait till the weekend?”

Steenz:
I know. I know.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s a pain.

Steenz:
[crosstalk 00:38:16] in the weekend, then, you feel like you wasted a large part of your weekend.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s true. That’s true. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out anyway. [crosstalk 00:38:25] Yeah. So, do you have a dream project that you would love to do one day or that you would love to work on?

Steenz:
Yes. So, I actually started on this dream project, and I believe that’s what got me in my job at as Heart of the City. I want to do a retelling of Encyclopedia Brown as a comic. Do you remember that book?

Maurice Cherry:
Okay. First of all, yes. I am very much of the mind that Encyclopedia Brown is black, very much so. I mean his first name is Leroy. So, I’m like, “Come on. He’s got to be black.” But no. Go ahead. I didn’t interrupt you. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Steenz:
Yeah. So, I want to do Encyclopedia Brown. And back in 2019 when I had all this free time, [crosstalk 00:39:10] I literally was like, “I have no excuse for not doing this mini-comic. I have no excuse at all.” It was before I was too busy, I got work, I’m too tired. But now, it’s like, “What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?”

Steenz:
So, I just made a mini-comic where I took one of Encyclopedia Brown stories. And the only thing that I changed was that Encyclopedia Brown was a black girl, and they kept everything else so their turn of phrase definitely still sounds like they’re in the ’60s even though they’re dressed today. So, I was leaning towards that whole Romeo plus Juliet Baz Luhrmann style where it’s current, but they’re also using older turn of phrase. You know what I mean?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah.

Steenz:
And so, I made that mini-comic, and I loved it, and it was so much fun. And I want to be able to do a full book of those. But I sold that mini-comic at SPX. And at SBX, was the editor of Heart of the City, and she saw that. And I think me showing the retellings and the re-imaginings that I really, really love to do, once I actually did them because I love to do them, people saw them, and they saw the Heart went into it, and it led to bigger and better things.

Steenz:
So, yeah, my goal is to make an Encyclopedia Brown comic. I definitely want to do that. I also have a comic that’s been on the back burner for a while. It’s a comic about how to buy a house as a freelancer which is super, super important because it’s hard out there, and it’s especially hard when you’re in the creative field, and you’re trying to prove to people that you’re legit, and you actually make money. So, that’s another thing. I’ve got all sorts of comic goals and whatnot. But I’m working on a graphic novel right now. I have to pace myself.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, I think both of those ideas are great. I mean I would love to see that retelling of Encyclopedia Brown. And actually even as you mentioned that how-to comic, it sort of reminded me of these sort of comic explainers that you see. I see them sometimes on the Nib or on similar types of publications. And those are super helpful.

Steenz:
I love that.

Maurice Cherry:
I was a freelancer.

Steenz:
[crosstalk 00:41:30] favorite things.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I was a freelancer for a long time and renting. And I’m still renting now. But I do, at one point, want to have my own separate little studio space whether that’s a house or whatever and like, “Yeah, it’ll be good to know what that process is like.” And now, as comics and things are being seen as more of a medium to tell stories, that’s a great way to do it.

Steenz:
Yeah, for sure. And I think those are the kinds of things that I really like to do. I mean I like telling goofy one-off stories. But the non-fiction stuff is the stuff that really excites me because I get to really break down information in the easy-to-understand way. That’s the goal, is to make it so that it’s easy for anybody to be able to do because it can be done. You just have to know the information. And for you, if you want to buy a house, the best advice that I can give you is to, once you decide you want to buy a house, give yourself two years before you apply because the first thing that a loan person is going to want to see is that you have stable income from the past two years.

Steenz:
So, if that’s getting all your 1099s together, making sure you’re completely organized when it comes to the money coming in and the money going out, if you do that for two years straight and have all the records for it, getting a loan for a house is not going to be hard for you. It’s really all about keeping track of all of your information. So, think about that.

Maurice Cherry:
Good information. Thank you for that tip. On a personal level, what have comics really done for you?

Steenz:
I think it has helped me figure out who I am as a person. As we’ve been talking about how much I really enjoy helping people and getting their stories out and making things easy and simple and giving the information away, all that stuff, I don’t think I would have learned any of that without comics. So, I think knowing what I think my master goal, my reason for being here, I think I don’t know if I would have figured that out if I didn’t have comics.

Maurice Cherry:
What would you say has been the best advice that you’ve been given about what you do? It could be about just life in general. It could be about comics in general, anything like that.

Steenz:
Well, as someone who had always been very anxious about what sort of projects I should or shouldn’t take on based on whether it was good for my career or whether it was the right step. There was always a lot of anxiety about which direction should I be going, and what direction is the right way. And a friend of mine, Shivana Sookdeo, who is a designer, she said that everything that you do is a stepping stone to where you’re going to be, but you do not need to step on every stone to get there.

Steenz:
And I think that made me a little less anxious about opportunities about trying new things, about saying no to things, about passing on things because when you’re a freelancer, saying no or passing on something means you’re not going to get that money. And so, your first thought is, “Okay. Well, where else am I going to get that money?”

Steenz:
But if it really feels like something that you don’t want to do, if it feels like something that’s going to make you really anxious or take up a lot of your time or be hard on you physically, then, don’t do it because there will be another chance for you to get that money. So, just knowing that I don’t have to say yes to every single thing that comes my way, in order to be successful, has helped with that anxiety, freelancer anxiety.

Maurice Cherry:
What advice would you give to anyone out there that’s listening to this, your story is resonating with them, and they want to sort of follow in your footsteps?

Steenz:
I would say keep very organized records whether that’s getting an external hard drive, investing in a printer and a file cabinet, keep good records, and that isn’t just records of boring work stuff. I mean records of things that have made you happy, records of letters that you have received. I think it’s really important to always have those records so that if you want, you can go back to them, and you can look at those, and you can feel those feelings again.

Steenz:
I always think about memento mori. We’re all going to pass this mortal coil. But while we are here, we should be able to reminisce on the things that were and also the things that you want in the future. So, keeping those records, what have you done? What do you want to do? What are you doing currently? Sometime in the future, you’re going to want to look back on it. I don’t know when, and I don’t know for what reason. But you will, and you’ll be happier knowing that you have those somewhere.

Maurice Cherry:
Where do you see yourself in the next five year? It’s 2026. All this pandemic stuff is behind us. Where do you see yourself? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Steenz:
Well, by 2026, my second book will be out and as well as my collection of Heart of the City. So, I hope that I’m filthy rich and an island of my own with a diamond suit. Now, I don’t know what I’m going to be doing in the next five years. I mean I like what I’m doing right now. I would really like for this pandemic to be over so that I could continue to do what I like right now which is traveling for conventions, meeting new people. Traveling for conventions is such a huge part of the comics industry that I really, really, really, really, really wanted to come back.

Steenz:
But five years from now, hopefully, doing the same stuff because I’m pretty happy with what I’m doing right now. Maybe, I’ll have even more mentees and new students that can take my advice, and I’d like to see them succeed as well. So, doing what I’m doing now, I’m pretty happy.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more about you and your work and everything online?

Steenz:
So, you can find me on social media as Oheysteenz. That’s O-H-E-Ysteenz. You can find me on Twitter, on Instagram, TikTok. And then, if you want to reach out to me for work, my email is oheysteenz@gmail. And then, also my website is oheysteenz.com. I like to keep things simple. So, it’s the same across the board. But yeah, that’s where you can look me up and find me. I’ll be there.

Maurice Cherry:
All right. Sounds good. Well, Steenz. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show for really, I mean one, sharing your story, but also really putting forth. Like I said earlier in the interview, I really get the sense that you really love helping people, and that’s something that definitely I got from listening to more about your background, hearing what you do with teaching even what you’re doing with helping with editing and things of that nature. It definitely feels like comics is a calling for you, and it’s a way for you to tell stories to the world. So, I’m glad to be able to interview you and to share your story with our audience. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Steenz:
You’re so welcome. Thank you for having me.

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Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world.

We accomplish this through graphic design, presentations and workshops around I-D-E-A: inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.

If you’re curious to learn how to combine a passion for I-D-E-A with design, check us out at brevityandwit.com.

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Steven Christian

Steven Christian’s motto is “create and conquer”, and that’s exactly what he’s managed to do with his career. While he started out as an athlete, a sports injury cause him to discover visual art, and he has reinvented himself as a multitalented cartoonist, podcaster, animator, and AR mobile developer. Oh, and he’s studying to apply to medical school. Talk about Black excellence!

Steven shared with me how he balances all of this, and talked about how the current times helped kickstart his career. We also talked about some of his projects — including the popular Pokémon Twerk Team — and he reminisced on growing up in northern California and detailed how his injury helped open his eyes to the worlds of art, design, and tech. Steven also talked about his Skillshare courses, listed some of his inspirations, and spoke about his dream collab and the hope of building more of a community around his work. Steven is a prime example of turning what could be seen as a tragedy into an amazing triumph!

Ray Billingsley

If you live in the United States and have read the funny pages any time within the past 30 years, then you already know about the work from this week’s guest. Ray Billingsley is the creator of Curtis, the daily comic that follows the life and times of a precocious 11-year-old Black boy, his family, and his classmates. I’m so glad to have the opportunity to share this conversation with a cartoon legend.

Ray gave an introduction to the Curtis comic universe, and talked about growing up in North Carolina and New York as a youth, attending SVA and working for Disney, and how he got his first national comic before beginning work on Curtis. Ray also shared his thoughts on new Black comic artists, discussed the value of peer mentorship, and spoke about what’s in the future for him and the strip. Ray’s diligence and steadfast commitment to his body of work is something every creative should take to heart, and I hope his story inspires you to pick up the baton and keep running that race!